WITH MINI announcing its strongest quarter one sales figures since the relaunch in 2001 and almost 15,000 cars sold, we Spoke to National Sales Manager, Rob Turnbull at the recent JCW launch about how the MINI brand is performing in the corporate market. The recently launched five-door, F55 hatch in particular.
“Since the introduction of the MINI five-door in October, it has been a tremendous success in the corporate market. The big change for us has been the five-door flexibility that the car brings and how it enables us to go into user chooser fleets where maybe the MINI brand hasn’t been in the past. That has been the major difference for us.
“We’re seeing the early fruits of that success, as 42% of the current corporate MINI mix, is the five-door hatch. Plus, we’ve been able to penetrate some corporates that we’ve never been able to go to before, with the range we already had. That would even include the Countryman. Five-door has given us a real opportunity.
“In terms of the model mix, it’s where we expected it to be. We always thought that when five-door came along, it would certainly dominate the model mix and it’s running at 60- 70% of our volume. It’s also 70% of our total fleet sales too.
“The MINI five-door is also starting to penetrate in terms of orders going forward and it’s all very much on the back of this car taking us into a marketplace that we weren’t before – so it’s incremental volume for us, rather than substitution and that was always the key impact of moving MINI into corporate.
Countryman remains a consistent performer for us with 18% of the mix and has been for the last three or four years
“We’ve consistently done 5-6,000 cars per year, but we expect that to grow exponentially this year, probably to 50-60% growth and close to between 8,500 and 10,000 MINIs through corporate.
“Countryman remains a consistent performer for us with 18% of the mix and has been for the last three or four years – both in retail and corporate. Of course we’ve enhanced the Countryman offering in the corporate market, with the introduction of the Cooper D Business Edition Auto, which was introduced two-months ago.
“Plus last year, the Countryman benefitted from a lifestyle facelift, which added real content to the car. From July this year, we’ve got the Park Lane edition, which has an enhanced specification, so what we want to do with the Countryman is to maintain that consistent performance.
“We’ve just renewed one of our customers contracts for the Countryman, because they needed that car as part of the flexibility of the fleet they rent. We’ve also seen a 90 unit replacement contract too – as these customers see the benefit of the Countryman as part of what they need to run their fleet.
“On the flip side, we’ve got the five-door and totally new customers, who haven’t been with MINI in the past – that for us is the big incremental opportunity.
“Corporate sales are dominated by the Cooper D five-door, although interestingly we seeing a migration towards petrol due to the huge improvement in the 1.5-litre three-cylinder. Actually, the 1.5-litre has been a great opportunity for us since the launch of the F56 and F55 hatches. It is such a strong performer, in terms of its performance and its credentials in the fleet market.
