It’s weird who benefits and who doesn’t from lockdown. Who would think that Frasers would win, Carvana lose, for example?
A general market feel is that Carvana (CVNA) is at serious risk of going down the tubes. Another is that Frasers (FRAS) has got things about right, which is why the shares have near doubled this past couple of years.
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It’s also something that we’ve mentioned before here. Covid and lockdown rippled through the economy and online shopping jumped during the related lockdowns. But, as we’ve mentioned before, the big question was whether it would stay at that new and high level or drop back to the previous trend level?
It’s weird who benefits and who doesn’t from lockdown. Who would think that Frasers would win, Carvana lose, for example?
Frasers benefited from having good management and Carvana suffered (and continues to suffer) from having shit management. Lockdowns had very little to do with where these two companies are right now.
Crikey. You take your eye off the ball for a second… I did not know that Sports Direct was now Frasers. Or vice-versa. Whatever.
“Frasers benefited from having good management”
There’s a sentence I thought I’d never read. Even though it hasn’t been a Glasgow firm for years, there’s still a bit of local pride there. The flagship store is really the last of its kind in Scotland since they shut Jenner’s.
As Denis POTO observes, Carvana’s issues lie elsewhere.
I had a friend try and buy a pickup from Carvana. When the delivery truck showed up, the pickup on the back had a different VIN from the number on the paperwork. Oh, and it wasn’t a 4WD after all . A mistake anyone could make.
Carvana’s just been dinged in (some southern state) for selling a vehicle that was previously stolen from a car-rental firm out West. A simple VIN check would have caught it.
Another case round here involved a car they sold that was acquired on a salvage (write-off) title in another state, ‘repaired’ and then sold on to Carvana, with a fake VIN and an altered title.
Never mind the literally thousands of cases, many in litigation, of Carvana buyers who simply could not get Carvana to process the paperwork required to get a title to the vehicle – in some cases, for years. Carvana has had their auto-dealer licenses taken away in multiple states for a pattern of this kind of dealing.
A management culture that lets this sort of thing go on, across the whole enterprise, for years on end, is not one which suggests business success. But we shouldn’t actually be surprised, since buying and selling cars is not the core business or the driver of profits – little wonder if they don’t take it very seriously.
llater,
llamas