Computerised management services company Auto-Mate may cut up to 16 jobs out of a total of 86, as its NX division has not been well-received by the market.
MD Michael Botha says the company has only recently started discussions with staff, and no decisions have been made yet. He adds that the company will aim to redeploy those employees elsewhere.
Auto-Mate is a local unlisted company that provides computerised management services to the South African automotive industry. The company is 93% owned by Britehouse and 7% owned by management.
Sixty percent of Britehouse is held by an empowerment and investment consortium comprising VenFin, Convergence Partners Investments and Safika Holdings. The remaining 40% is held by Dimension Data.
Auto-Mate's NX software was a dealer management system that the company had attempted to rewrite, but its acceptance in the market was “not as we had hoped”. Botha adds that there are two options on the table, and the company will make a decision in the next eight weeks.
Lost deal
The company was unsuccessful in its bid to retain the Unitrans account, but this was not the reason for the retrenchments, Botha says. He adds that Unitrans will remain with the company until the middle of 2011 as it is phased over to the new supplier.
The company is profitable and can sufficiently meet the needs of the clients it serves, he adds.
Auto-Mate's head office is in Johannesburg, and it also has offices in Cape Town and Durban. The company is represented in Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ghana, Swaziland, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UK.
Auto-Mate has a user base of more than 800 dealerships, representing about 9 000 individual users. These range from small dealerships to large multi-site dealer groups, and its software is endorsed by Toyota, Ford, Mazda, SsangYong, Delta (General Motors), Nissan, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Daewoo, Land Rover, Hyundai, Iveco, Volvo, Volkswagen, Kia, Renault, Daihatsu and Mitsubishi.
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