Jeremy Thomson

JEREMY THOMSON, Highachieving MD of Mazda UK and winner of an Autocar Outstanding UK Leader award, knows more than most do about riding a series of sales peaks and troughs.

Hired as f leet director in 2001 before becoming marketing director and then sales director, Thomson was instrumental in trebling sales over the next six years and looked like the right man to take over when the business needed a new MD towards the end of a stellar 2008. The problem was that a few weeks earlier, Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt, crashing global business and dramatically weakening the sterling-yen relationship.

“We had to reconfigure the business completely and cut the number of dealers from 165 to 130 as sensitively as we could,” he says. “We did reasonably well from the 20092010 scrappage scheme, but we had become smaller, so volume fell from 50,000 in 2008 to 26,000 in 2012. But we worked, and after that we had three years of double-digit growth.”

Leaner, more efficient and buoyed by enticing new models, Mazda UK had recovered nearly all of its lost ground by the time Brexit occurred – at which point the yensterling relationship went wrong all over again. Again it became much harder to sell cars profitably, although the market held up.

“We were ready this time,” says Thomson, “and we’ve also benefited from measures we took in the hard times to elevate our brand value. They’ve worked better than in any other European market. We’re close to parity with Volkswagen now, which is what I think we deserve.”