Ein a small office in Berlin-Weißensee, the year is 2008, the financial crisis is dominating the headlines. In crises there are opportunities, it is often said in the start-up scene. Max Wegner, Vitalij Kungel and Alexej Erdle tried their luck and got into the online business: the trio sold car spare parts online.
How did this happen? It all began when his co-founder got upset about the high prices for small repairs on his own car, Alexej Erdle tells in an interview with “Gründerszene”. Accordingly, Vitalij Kungel had to pay 60 euros to replace a burnt out light bulb.
Because it seemed too expensive to him, he went in search of cheaper offers. “In doing so, he found out that the light bulb only cost five euros to buy,” Erdle remembers. Big market and big margins? The business idea stood.
The three late resettlers were born in Russia and came to Berlin as teenagers. They left school with a secondary school certificate. Erdle, for example, trained as a car mechanic, Kungel as an office clerk.
He had wanted to start his own business, says Erdle, and when he heard about the other two’s business idea from his brother, he was immediately involved. The history of the founding goes as follows: the three founders put their first products online on the website pkwteile.de – and business starts.
Up to a billion and then further: Autodoc founder Alexej Erdle and CEO Christian Gisy
Which: Autodoc
After a few weeks, the first 50,000 euros in sales are there. The very first sale? A lightbulb, Erdle remembers. The company was profitable after just a few weeks.
The second website follows, autoteiledirekt.de, then autoersatzteile.de – with the identifier .at finally also in Austria and with .ch in Switzerland, without reprogramming anything.
Different page designs are intended to do justice to the purchasing behavior of different customer groups, but the business behind it is always the same. The concept works, in 2010 the turnover hit one million. This encouraged Wegner, Kungel and Erdle to leave the German-speaking area and to internationalize within Europe – to France, Spain, Italy.
Company Autodoc belongs to the three founders
Today the platform is called Autodoc, employs around 5,000 people – soon there will be another 200 more – and is currently building a new office with 14,000 square meters at the well-known Club Tacheles near Friedrichstrasse.
To this day, the company is 100 percent owned by the three founders. “We did think about whether we should take VC money. However, we never needed that to finance the growth,” says Erdle. Of course there have also been challenges. “But they were more about meeting customer expectations,” says the co-founder.
Wegner, Kungel and Erdle left the operational business last year and handed over the task of continuing to grow Autodoc to the former Cinemaxx boss and Scout24 board member Christian Gisy.
He brings a lot of experience from the platform business. What he wants to promote in particular is the private label business. This promises higher margins, the share of total sales was around 16 percent last year.
Business is booming, with sales exceeding one billion last year. Autodoc brokered goods of this value because the company is “asset light” – it does not buy and sell the vehicle spare parts, but brokers them as a marketplace and for a commission between seller and customer.
The latter mainly includes private individuals, “car mechanics”, smaller workshops – but also one of the large sharing providers. “We are set up as a B2C brand, but we will also launch a B2B platform in the coming year,” says Gisy.
Autodoc makes about half of its sales via its own app. “We can keep customers better with them and the shopping baskets are larger,” says the new CEO. According to the company, the operating result – as adjusted Ebitda – was 123.9 million euros.
“In crises people tend to repair rather than buy new”
How is the current situation with a lot of uncertainty and high inflation affecting Autodoc’s business? Since Gisy stays relaxed. “In crises, people tend to repair rather than buy new,” he says.
He sees a challenge in the “Act to Strengthen Consumer Protection in Competition and Trade Law”, which came into force at the end of May and implements stricter rules, especially for the business of intermediaries, for example in pricing, which was an important thing for Autodoc from the start tool was. For example, sellers must always provide consumers with the lowest total price communicated within the last 30 days for each price reduction.
The Autodoc founders Max Wegner, Vitalij Kungel and Alexej Erdle see their own company in good hands after their exit with the new board – in addition to CEO Gisy, Bert Althaus as CFO and CTO Dmitry Zadorojnii – Erdle said in an interview with “Gründerszene”. Do they also want to sell shares or do they want to list Autodoc soon to take some money with them? “I don’t want to say anything about that.”
For your orientation: The used car portal had a turnover of 4.8 billion euros last year and at the IPO in February 2021 it achieved an – albeit extremely optimistic – valuation of 12 billion euros – which corresponds to a factor of two and a half. Transferred to Autodoc, the founders could expect a handsome sum.
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