Last year, about 27.5 million used cars changed hands in Europe.
One company touched roughly 842,000 of them.
It runs the largest used car logistics network on the continent. More than 1.5 million individual car transports in a single year. Over 170 logistics compounds. Seven hundred and twenty-five buying branches, and it added 178 of those in twelve months alone.
It has been training pricing models on private transaction data since around 2017, back when “AI” was still something you had to explain at dinner parties.
And here is the strange part. Out of every euro that runs through the business, it keeps about 2.4 cents as operating profit. That sounds like a rounding error. Management thinks it’s on the way to somewhere between 5 and 9 cents, and the company is worth watching precisely because of that gap.
There are two businesses stacked inside one company. The first one is big, fast, and profitable, and almost nobody talks about it. The second one loses money on every single car it sells, deliberately, and it is the entire reason the first one exists.
The company currently has about 3.1% of its market. It wants 10%.
Below, I’ll walk through how the machine actually works, what it earns per car, how it finances a billion euros of inventory without carrying corporate debt, and the four or five things that could genuinely break it.
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