With new-car margins under pressure, Group 1 Automotive nevertheless reported record full-year revenues of $22.6 billion for 2025, a 13.2% increase over 2024.
Houston-based Group 1 said it had record revenues for the year across all business lines, led by Parts & Service, and Finance & Insurance.
“Our technicians are more productive now,” Daryl Kenningham, Group 1 president and CEO, said Jan. 29 in an earnings conference call. “One of the reasons is because our turnover is down 10 points,” he said, without disclosing the current turnover rate.
Among other measures, a Group 1 project to air-condition all its service departments nationwide has helped with retention, the company said.
Group 1 expects still more improvement out of Fixed Ops and F&I in 2026, and to grow its used-vehicle business as well, Kenningham said in the call.
On the new-car side, for its U.S. operations, Group 1 had 40,500 new vehicles sold at retail in the fourth quarter, down 4.2% from the year-ago quarter. For the year, U.S. operations sold 157,790 new vehicles, up 2.8%. Figures are on a same-store basis.
For the quarter, for U.S. operations average new-car gross profit per new vehicle sold was down 12.7% from a year ago, to $3,181. For the year, average new-car gross profit was down 7.9% from a year ago, to $3,371, according to Group 1.
To improve Fixed Ops performance, CFO Daniel McHenry said that in 2025, Group 1 continued a long-term effort to add and retain service technicians, and repurposed some collision-repair service bays to higher-profit customer-pay and warranty work.
In the fourth quarter, Group 1’s U.S. operations reported parts and service revenue of $525.5 million, 2.9% higher than the fourth quarter of 2024. For the full year, U.S. parts and service revenue was $2.1 billion, up 7.1% from 2024. Those figures are on a same-store basis.
To put its U.S. operations in context, Group 1 gets roughly 75% of its new-vehicle unit sales in the United States, versus roughly 25% from the United Kingdom.
Group 1’s Kenningham said the increase in the 2025 parts and service results was bigger than the net increase in technician headcount.
The company reported U.S. technician headcount increased 2.3% in 2025 versus 2024, but customer-pay work increased 5% in the fourth quarter versus a year ago and warranty work increased 11%. Collision repair was down 17%, Group 1 said.
“Parts and service continue to be a differentiator for Group 1 Automotive, Inc., providing both growth and stability,” Kenningham said in the call.
