Investment will increase addressable market and accelerate the development of new offerings

TORONTO, ON — May 27, 2021 — Activix, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions for the automotive industry, today announced that it has received a strategic investment from TRADER Corporation, a portfolio company of private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo.

“This investment will accelerate our growth plans in Canada, fast-track our product development, and enable us to serve our customers even better,” said Olivier Tétrault, President and Founder of Activix.

Activix boasts the most innovative CRM system in Canada, allowing car dealers to consolidate inbound lead management with showroom and salesperson activity into one streamlined dashboard. Both sales and service efficiency are enhanced via the technology, while Activix also offers innovative training solutions to dealership employees.

“Activix has built a truly transformational CRM product which enables car dealerships of all sizes to significantly improve their efficiency and sales conversions via robust technology backed by dedicated customer support,” said Sebastian Baldwin, President and Chief Executive Officer at TRADER Corporation. “We look forward to helping Activix scale their business, as well as exploring the opportunities to help our dealer partners be more effective by leveraging synergies between Activix and TRADER’s other software offerings. Those include TAdvantage websites, 1-SOURCE inventory management and Motoinsight Digital Retailing, among others.”

Investment in Montreal-based digital advertising company, DealerBreacher, becomes part of several TRADER services and solutions intended to help automotive dealerships to grow and succeed

Toronto, ON (May 31, 2018) – TRADER Corporation is pleased to announce a strategic investment in DealerBreacher, a leading digital advertising services company based in Montreal. This investment continues TRADER’s commitment to offer dealers premium solutions designed specifically for the Canadian market that solve dealers’ business needs and drive results.

With rapid growth in the Quebec market, DealerBreacher has differentiated itself by providing tailored digital advertising solutions for Canadian automotive dealers, backed by unique business intelligence technology. As a young and agile company, DealerBreacher concentrates on delivering complete transparency to customers including consistent communication and digital marketing performance results.

TRADER’s investment in DealerBreacher will support the company’s future plans focused on speed of innovation – all clearly linked to Canadian dealer and consumer needs.

“From a technology and local talent perspective, we look forward to combining our strengths to broaden our presence and understanding of the local automotive market in Quebec,” said Jeff Woolcock, Chief Sales Officer at TRADER. “Our investment in DealerBreacher is part of our ongoing innovation roadmap to bring best-in-class Canadian technology solutions to our customers.”

DealerBreacher will become part of TRADER effective today. The company will continue to operate independently from TRADER, under the same leadership team.

“Our mandate is to make dealers more visible and relevant throughout the entire car buying process,” said Benoit Laforce, Co-Founder of DealerBreacher. “By working with TRADER, we will gain access to its 40 years of experience in the Canadian automotive market so that we can offer additional consumer insights and resources to drive our unique value proposition. With TRADER, our technology and product platform will enable future growth and dealer success.”

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About TRADER Corporation
TRADER Corporation is a trusted Canadian leader in online media, managing consumer automotive marketplaces and providing dealers with digital business solutions to market and manage their inventory. The company’s primary online destinations include gotrader.ca and AutoHebdo.net, driving over 16 million visits a month and more than 4.1 million mobile app downloads. Both gotrader.ca and AutoHebdo.net offer an extensive inventory of new and used vehicles in Canada across both desktop and mobile platforms. Partnering with global leaders, TRADER delivers best-in-class digital web, advertising and inventory management solutions to help accelerate business performance of dealers across Canada.

For more information, visit: go.trader.ca

Follow TRADER on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube!

 

About DealerBreacher.com INC
DealerBreacher.com, member of the Google Premier Partner channel, is a technology company based out of Quebec, specializing in automotive online marketing including Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Networks. DealerBreacher has developed a unique SEM platform allowing dealers to promote their dealerships and their inventory to capture consumer intent and get the highest quality of traffic.

For more information, visit: DealerBreacher.com

 

Media Inquiries

Michelle Saraceno
Senior Manager, Communications Strategy
TRADER Corporation | gotrader.ca
416.784.5200 ext. 3599
michelle.saraceno@trader.ca

San Francisco, CA – July 1, 2016 – Thoma Bravo, LLC, a leading private equity investment firm, announced the acquisition of TRADER Corporation (TRADER), Canada’s leading digital automotive marketplace and software solutions provider, from funds advised by Apax Partners for approximately C$1.575 billion.  The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close by the fourth quarter of 2016.

“We’re extremely impressed by TRADER’s growth into the largest and most trusted digital automotive marketplace in Canada,” said Holden Spaht, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. “We look forward to partnering with Sebastian Baldwin and the entire TRADER team in their commitment to innovation and accelerating the use of TRADER’s current and future software solutions.”

TRADER Corporation is Canada’s largest and most trusted digital automotive marketplace and provides the most comprehensive set of marketing software solutions to Canadian automotive dealers. Its market leading online properties — gotrader.ca, AutoHebdo.net and Autos.ca — attract 13 million visits per month and are regularly relied upon by over 5,000 dealers, listing over 450,000 vehicles.  In addition, the company provides software solutions that enable its dealer customers to make smarter and faster business, inventory, and marketing decisions.

Sebastian Baldwin, TRADER’s President and CEO, said: “Thoma Bravo’s track record of success in working with and growing software solutions companies makes them the ideal partner for the next phase of TRADER’s growth.  We look forward to working closely with them to continue strengthening TRADER’s market leading position.”

“TRADER is well positioned to continue providing high return-on-investment products to its customer base,” said Arvindh Kumar, a principal at Thoma Bravo. “We’re excited to collaborate with TRADER to expand its product portfolio organically and through strategic investments and acquisitions.”

Peter Stefanski, a vice president at Thoma Bravo added: “We have spent several years evaluating the broader automotive technology sector.  Our partnership with TRADER is an excellent opportunity to invest in a mission-critical franchise we believe will benefit from the growth in automotive online media advertising.”

Kirkland & Ellis LLP and McMillan LLP served as legal advisors to Thoma Bravo. Evercore served as M&A advisor.

Rural Dealer Wins Top Prize in Canada

 

Today, TRADER Corporation announced the winner of the 2015 Driven to Perform Contest. The contest, which debuted for the first time early last year, aimed to recognize the top performing dealer in Canada. The inaugural winner was selected based on key performance metrics using the vAuto inventory management solution, including: turn rate, average days in inventory, cost to market and price to market.

“We are excited to announce Craig Dunn Motor City from Portage LaPrairie, MB as the winner of the 2015 Driven to Perform Contest. When we compared their performance prior to using vAuto to where they are today, it’s really quite impressive to see the growth transition and efficiencies the product has created,” says Robert Rath, Vice President of Business Development at TRADER.

vAuto is the only inventory management solution on the market that integrates live local market data powered by gotrader.ca. With over 8,500 dealerships subscribing to vAuto in North America, the solution offers unique tools to help dealers make better and faster sourcing, appraising and pricing decisions.

“I was surprised by the results [of vAuto], it’s absolutely the only reason I can remain competitive outside of major metro [Winnipeg], especially in today’s economy where there may be less consumer demand,” says Tyler Dunn, Sales Manager of Craig Dunn Motor City. The dealership, part of the Murray Group of dealerships, has been a vAuto subscriber for over 3 years and is located 100 kilometers outside of Winnipeg.”

The dealership recognized their biggest challenge prior to using vAuto was the high cost of advertising inventory to attract customers outside of their local market. Management knew they needed to find more efficient ways to attract these customers in order to decrease their average days in inventory and increase their turn rates.

“We needed a way to attract customers without spending thousands of dollars marketing every single unit. vAuto helped us realize that the only way to do this was to not only source the right vehicles that are in demand in our market, but to find the perfect price to market those vehicles right off the bat, even if it meant pricing our inventory lower than market average,” says Dunn. He admits that while it did take some time to get buy in from his team, vAuto has made a huge impact on his dealership performance, bringing in more and more customers from surrounding areas.

He adds, “Since using vAuto, we’ve improved our volume and gross per unit every year, the sales guys are happy, the customers are happy, and we continue to sell more cars.”

TRADER recently kicked off the second annual Driven to Perform Contest and invites all qualified dealerships to participate. *The winning dealership will receive their current vAuto subscription free for 2017! For more information and to sign up please click here.

Dealer Solution Partners Extend their 5-year Partnership Agreement and Expand Nation-wide Product Offering

Toronto, ON – June 12, 2015 – Today, TRADER Corporation announced it has renewed its partnership with US based solutions company, vAuto. The two companies, which have been in partnership since 2011, have extended their relationship for five years to help dealers address their used vehicle inventory management challenges.

The agreement will allow TRADER to continue being the exclusive Canadian reseller of the vAuto product suite, and will enable vAuto to maintain their ongoing integration with TRADER’s proprietary consumer and marketplace data.

“It was important for us to continue our partnership with vAuto. Since the beginning, we’ve seen exponential growth in product adoption, and the dealers who use vAuto have seen remarkable results, including a 30% reduction in the average days in inventory. vAuto provides major financial benefits to a dealer,” explains Robert Rath, VP of Dealership Products & Business Development at TRADER.

With over 10 years of industry tenure, vAuto is the premier provider of inventory management solutions and serves more than 7,500 dealerships in North America. The company hopes to continue expanding their customer base in Canada through TRADER’s existing network of automotive dealers.

“vAuto’s technology helps dealers mine real-time local market data to make used vehicle decisions,” says Randy Kobat, Vice President and General Manager for vAuto. “With these data-driven insights, they understand the correct vehicles to stock, how much to pay for a trade-in or auction vehicle and how to price vehicles to drive traffic. These dealers have learned that real-time market data provides better outcomes for their businesses than relying on transactional and historical data to make decisions.”

As part of the renewed partnership, TRADER and vAuto are in discussions to introduce exciting new initiatives in the coming months.

The first initiative coming later this year is the launch of vAuto’s Subprime Booking tool, which will assist dealers in sourcing subprime inventory to meet the demands of credit-challenged customers. With concerns over Canada’s growing consumer debt, the need for a Subprime tool is more relevant than ever. “Subprime is an area of business that tends to be overlooked, but in the grand scheme of things dealers could be losing significant sales and F&I profit every month on Subprime vehicle sales,” says Rath.

Later in the fall, TRADER will be hosting an exclusive event featuring vAuto founder Dale Pollak, who created the Velocity Method of Management and authored three books for dealers on the subject. Pollak will share his forward-thinking insights and inventory management best practices for Canadian dealers. More information on the event schedule will be released in the coming weeks.

 

ABOUT TRADER
TRADER Corporation is a trusted Canadian leader in online media, automotive consumer marketplaces, and automotive-focused digital marketing solutions. The company’s best-of-breed product portfolio includes Web Solutions powered by Dealer.com, a full arsenal of tools and technology to turn automobile dealerships into serious online competitors, and vAuto’s Provision®, a robust offering to help clients make faster and smarter inventory decisions based on real time local market knowledge. Our online marketplaces and destinations include: gotrader.ca, AutoHebdo.net and Autos.ca. Please visit go.trader.ca for more information.

ABOUT vAuto
vAuto® provides innovative technology, tools and business intelligence to thousands of dealerships across the United States and Canada, helping them compete more effectively and increase sales volumes and profits. Founded in 2005, vAuto revolutionized dealers’ used vehicle operations with the groundbreaking Provision® suite of tools. Leveraging The Velocity Method of Management®, pioneered by vAuto’s visionary founder, Dale Pollak, the Provision suite guides used vehicle acquisition, appraisals, pricing, merchandising and more based on real-time, local market supply-and-demand data. In 2014, vAuto combined the Velocity method with the power of incentive management to create the Conquest new vehicle inventory management and pricing tool. In addition, vAuto Genius Labs provides smart, simple and stand-alone solutions including AuctionGenius. Headquartered near Chicago, Illinois, vAuto is wholly owned by Cox Automotive, which also includes Manheim Auctions, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book®, Xtime®, VinSolutions® and Haystak® Digital Marketing and HomeNet Automotive®. For more information, visit www.vauto.com.