The whole MG Motor UK operation consists of just 68 people.
Its head office in London includes a styling studio and a showroom but still has not just empty desks but empty floors, while the engineering team at Longbridge is just a few people tasked with setting up the Chinese company’s cars for British roads – and this is all through choice.
For a brand that entered the top 10 in the UK for the first 11 months of 2024 with almost 75,000 cars sold, overtaking Vauxhall, it’s a remarkably lean operation.
In 2017, only one model generation ago, MG sold fewer than 5000 cars here. It now has 100,000 sales in its sights in what has become its biggest market globally – a figure that Kia didn’t achieve until 2022 and Hyundai has yet to reach.
An industry veteran in his fifth decade of service, Guy Pigounakis is enjoying life as commercial director at MG Motor UK, a place he says is refreshingly “free of politics” and straightforward in its approach, with the Chinese management leaving the experienced UK team to it.
“Most people wouldn’t believe or want to believe it, but we have a huge amount of autonomy,” he told me.
Pigounakis is aware that MG’s Chinese ownership and manufacturing is seen as giving it an unfair advantage on costs, but he says: “When people start talking about our ‘unfair’ advantage, I wonder why they have 350 people in the head office of a national sales company…”
According to Pigounakis, MG’s past absolutely helps it today by giving it such strong brand recognition.
While marketers might think they sell cars to people straight out of university, the fact of the matter is most people are buying new cars in their late forties, fifties or early sixties”, says Pigounakis, and people of those ages are “always affectionate” in the way they talk about MG.
As for whether or not it bothers people that MG is now Chinese, Pigounakis says “we overestimate people’s knowledge and interest in the industry” and states: “The average customer doesn’t care.”
“Nine times out of 10, you [as a buyer] are just looking for the best deal in the market at that time”, he says, once you are at the end of a finance contract.
MG’s sales growth in the UK has come so fast that its aftersales operations haven’t caught up, and Pigounakis is in the process of enacting a plan with dealers to resolve this.
A wider industry shortage of technicians is offered as one reason, but Pigounakis knows that “as a conquest brand, we can’t afford for any part of that experience that a customer has to fall short of their expectations”.
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