A closer look at Halfords

Halfords is the market leader in the retail sale of motoring and cycling products. And it does some servicing of cars and bicycles at its retail stores.
Its motoring servicing business has grown from virtually nothing 12 years ago to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, player in a very fractured market. Being the biggest means you only have 2% of the market.
Halfords has hundreds of fixed and mobile locations in UK and Ireland, bestowing economies of scale and widespread brand recognition for Halfords itself (but the car service places are less well known)....
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Most of the revenue growth has come from half-a-dozen acquisitions in the motor service business over the last 12 years which cost around £160m to buy, and from inflation.
The directors’ medium term plan is for over half of the Group’s business to be service related. Over £400m of current revenue already comes from the car servicing segment.
They aim to be “the super-specialists in motoring and cycling, trusted by the nation… [offering] motoring services in a retail store, a garage, at home or at work.”
The directors claim that the combination of 400 stores, 606 garages (tyres, batteries, MOTs, exhausts, etc) and a mobile van provision to service cars and commercial vehicles at home/office/roadside means they can offer unrivalled amenity.
The company has 181 vans aimed at consumers called Halfords Mobile Expert vans. In addition, 68 vans are dedicated to mobile tyre fitting and another 192 vans are focused on helping businesses with their fleets (tyre fitting by the roadside, etc.). There are also four vans servicing cyclists.
The complementary services offered from stores, garages and vans are all displayed on a single landing page at Halfords.com, offering the company potential opportunities to sell additional products and services from across the Group:
“Online has played a pivotal role in our success over the last two years. Our website re-platform at the end of FY20 brought together three individual websites, enabling customers to see the full breadth and scope of our offer in one place. This has provided powerful synergies that have included increasing Halfords Retail customers’ awareness of Autocentres [garages] and facilitating cross shop through the ability to bundle cross-Group products and services into one basket.
"The new web platform has also delivered tactical improvements to the customer shopping experience. Since launch, we have invested in [making it]….simpler to navigate for our customers. Whether this has been to support new customers into staycation products through guided selling, or finding a bike through our dynamic stock finder.” (2022 Prelims)
The RETAIL Strategic Business Unit, SBU
Retail accounts for about three-quarters of overall turnover, with very roughly half of that from selling cycling related goods and services and the other half from selling motoring stuff and fitting wiper blades in Halfords car parks, etc.
Retail SBU statistics.....