It was a successful year in the rearview mirror for Asbury Automotive Group, with record annual revenues for 2025 of about $18 billion, up 5% versus a year ago, and record fourth-quarter 2025 revenues of $4.7 billion, up 4%.
Net income for 2025 was $492 million, up 14% versus 2024. In the fourth quarter, net income was $60 million, down 53%, reflecting several one-time impairments.
The increases came even though Asbury was busy onboarding an extra-large acquisition and rolling out a new, cloud-based dealer management system across the entire organization at the same time.
“We’ve had a lot of distractions in ’25, between the acquisition and rolling out Tekion,” said David Hult, president and CEO, in an earnings conference call Feb. 5.
The acquisition was the $1.3 billion buyout, announced in February 2025, of the Herb Chambers Automotive Group, Somerville, Mass., with 33 dealerships, 52 franchises and three collision centers.
The new DMS is the Tekion Automotive Retail Cloud system. Tekion, based in Pleasanton, California, succeeds CDK Global. CDK suffered a service outage due to a cybersecurity incident in parts of June and July 2024, which all but halted operations temporarily for many dealership groups, including Asbury.
Meanwhile, Tekion and Asbury had already announced a new relationship in January 2024, starting with a pilot program. Tekion says its platform runs dealership retail, service, parts, accounting, customer relationship management and analytics.
In the recent conference call, and in previous quarterly calls, Hult has been candid in saying that as much as he likes Tekion, it’s a headache for any dealership group to switch DMS systems. That’s because the DMS ties into so many operations, and because the end users at dealerships like whatever system they’re used to, and which may have taken years to really master.
On top of that, during the transition, the company had to pay for two DMS systems for several months, which will be a “headwind” to earnings in 2026, Hult said.
“Every store we roll out, technicians don’t like change. They hate the new software. It’s got a lot of key changes. It’s difficult,” he said.
However, Hult said that after using the system for a couple of months, the same technicians “wouldn’t work at a store that didn’t have Tekion,” because it’s so much faster and easier for employees and customers.
Dan Clara, the company’s chief operating officer and future CEO, said in the conference call that as of the end of January, Asbury had 46 dealerships running on Tekion, or more than 25% of its dealerships, with 125 more to go. Hult said Asbury expects to have Tekion rolled out to all its dealerships by “late fall” of 2026.
Hult insists that after another six months or so of “bumpiness” and distraction in 2026, it will be worth it in 2027, the first full year the entire company is employing the new DMS.
“So, I think all this blocking and tackling, and the heavy lifting we’re doing, is going to pay dividends going into the future,” Hult said in the call. “We know the outcome will be very beneficial for Asbury Automotive Group.”
