Swan Soong: Jaguar Land Rover to divorce distributor

Poor Wellington Soong. After launching the Jaguar Land Rover distributorship just as the Asian currency crisis was engulfing the region – Soong has had to give up his restaurant business and real estate assets to save the fledgling auto dealership – the new Indian overlords of the British motoring icon are giving him, in Duterte-speak, the Bumbay squeeze.

According to the grapevine, the 20-year exclusive distributor agreement that will end this month will no longer be renewed after Soong balked at a new JLR imposition: build a five-story showroom, service center and stockroom combined, preferably in the Makati-Fort area, or lose the franchise.

Soong declined to comment when reached, but the news of the impending breakup has apparently been known to the small circle of luxury car dealerships.

According to the grapevine, JLR had already approached Cats Motors for preliminary discussions, offering the business to the local distributor of rival Mercedes-Benz.

But rather than cast his lot with, and allocate a fortune building a new showroom for, the Indian-British competition, Cats Motor chairman Felix Ang has chosen to stick with the better-selling, and better quality image, German icon.

Soong

As to the proposed showroom, JLR already has an existing, excellently-situated showroom at the Fort, right across the St. Luke’s Medical Center. But given the historical low sales volumes of JLR, Soong has combined the showroom with his Ferrari and Maserati dealerships to reduce operating costs.

And just like Ayala’s arrangement with the biggest automotive company Volkswagen that allowed Ayala to have the VW showroom at the Fort but the service center in Ortigas, Soong also has a different service center for the JLR vehicles, located just outside North Forbes.

With Cats showing little interest, the next candidate for the JLR dealership would be Bermaz Auto, the Malaysian group that holds the Mazda dealership in the country as well as British dealerships of Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Maserati.

Coincidentally, Bermaz Auto is in the midst of an IPO application process which would raise about P640 million in net proceeds, money that it intends to allocate for anew showroom-service center and a painting facility warehouse for Mazda.

As to Soong, the industry chatter is that he would continue servicing the thousands of Jaguar and Land Rovers that he has sold in the two-decade span, having not only built first-name basis relationship with his A-list customers, but also crucial supply agreements with OEM parts manufacturers.

And just like the so-called Timog and Greenhills independent dealers, Soong and his successor sons could end up doing some parallel importation for choice JLR models as well.

Money talks

Shake Shack has managed to thwart an attempt by Y-Fi Business Solutions, controlled by IP Ventures Group president Jaime Enrique Gonzalez, to appropriate the US restaurant’s trade name and mark after Y-Fi failed to file a declaration of actual use within three years from filing the trademark application.

Filipino-American billionaire Loida Nicolas-Lewis shrugged off the “fake news” that she was behind the recent anti-Duterte editorial of the New York Times, attending a Philippine consulate function Thursday and even making beso-beso with Consul General Theresa Dizon-De Vega and other consulate officials.

Heard through the grapevine

Ambassador to the United Nations Teodoro Locsin Jr. and wife Louie are temporarily staying in their former East 60th St. condo in New York, right across Bloomingdale’s, while waiting for the renovation of the Imelda townhouse to be finished.

The Locsins used to own a pied-a-terre there, until the couple sold their apartment in 2002 for the grand sum of $0.00 to a tax and bankruptcy lawyer when Locsin first became a Makati congressman.