Medford auto retailer nets $40.7 million in first reporting period of 2015.
BY JACOB PALMER | DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Medford-based auto retailer, Lithia Motors, netted $40.7 million in the first reporting period of 2015.
That represents the company’s best-ever first quarter and second-best reporting period, according to the Medford Mail Tribune.
The success has the company eyeing more growth.
From the MT:
“We are actively evaluating acquisition candidates and note that with the DCH combination, we now have identified over 2,600 potential target stores,” CEO and President Bryan DeBoer told analysts during a Wednesday conference call. “We remain confident in our ability to find … purchases to increase our portfolio and grow earnings.”
While it would be hard to top last year’s $362.5 million acquisition of DCH Auto Group, DeBoer suggested the company is poised for when the time is ripe: “Obviously, there are only about nine other ones that are larger than DCH in the country, so those may be a little hard to come by,” DeBoer said. “But ones that are about half that size or maybe a quarter of that size are out there. We really believe that those are definitely on the radar.”
The company’s profits in Q1 of 2014 were $24.7 million — a 64 percent increase.
From a separate MT story:
“For the fourth consecutive quarter, we achieved double digit growth in same store sales in all business lines,” Bryan DeBoer, President and CEO, said during a conference call [Wednesday] morning. “We remain focused on capturing additional market share, improving existing store results, the continued success, integration and growth of DCH and actively seeking accretive acquisitions.”
Lithia said unadjusted net income from continuing operations for the first quarter of 2015 was $40.7 million, or $1.53 per diluted share, compared to $24.7 million, or $0.94 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2014. Those figures were related to the sale of store and an adjustment to a reserve associated with a lawsuit filed in 2006 and settled in 2013, a loss from a hailstorm in Texas and a reserve for a contract assumed in an acquisition.
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