Auto Trader has seen its profit before tax increase to 9 per cent to £375.7m on the back of launching a suite of AI-powered products called Co-Driver,
The Manchester-headquartered group also reported a a 5 per cent rise in total revenue to £601.1 for the year ending March 31st, 2025, primarily fueled by a 7 per cent rise in Auto Trader’s own revenue, which reached £564.8m.
Autorama, the industry giant’s leasing division, contributed an additional £36.3m.
Auto Trader Group plc is the UK’s largest automotive platform and has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since March 2015.
Nathan Coe, CEO of Auto Trader, said: “Our growth is testament to the hard work from everyone at Auto Trader to deliver value for all our partners.
“While the car market generally is in good health, retailers face headwinds from shifting market dynamics, which we’re committed to helping them navigate using the strength of our data and technology.
“Consumer behaviour is changing. That’s why we’ve invested in the technologies to help all retailers confidently meet buyer expectations. And it’s for the same reason that we’ve made the decision to make Deal Builder available on all vehicles on Auto Trader.
“This means that all our partners will now be able to benefit from receiving more deals from highly engaged and ready to purchase buyers, rather than simply leads alone, helping to drive their performance through unique buyer and vehicle insights.”
Coe highlighted the launch of the company’s suite of AI-powered products called Co-Driver as a game-changed.
He said: “It is delivering one of the most significant improvements to our search experience and our retailer tools in years.
“The first wave of Co-Driver products has already successfully enhanced the quality of adverts, while reducing the amount of time it takes for retailers to advertise their vehicles.
“We see significant potential for the use of AI to improve the buying and selling of cars in the years ahead.”The report also underlined the company’s strong workplace culture, viewing it as central to its overall success.”
Deal Builder, which enables car buyers to value their part-exchange, apply for finance and reserve a car, has continued to scale to c.2,000 retailers at the end of March 2025.
Auto Trader continues to support an inclusive workplace through employee-led networks focusing on gender equality, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ inclusion, mental health, early careers, neurodiversity, social mobility and family support.
As of March 2025, women made up 44 per cent of the overall workforce and 43 per cent of leadership roles.
This was something which chief people and operations officer, Alison Ross MBE, spoke about at BusinessCloud recently roundtable to coincide with International Women’s Day.
The winner of the Northern Leaders Tech Award said: “We’ve made big efforts at AutoTrader over the last 13 or 14 years to bring more women into tech.
“It is very, very hard to do. And I think the conclusion I’m coming to is that trying to pretend men and women are the same in how they sort of do their careers is wrong and actually does women, particularly women engineers, a disservice.
“What we typically see is in an early careers cohort, we can get to about 50/50 with women and men. But the men will typically have been real tech heads all their lives, whereas the women, maybe we’ve inspired or encouraged or role modeled them in from something else.
“It has been men actually speaking to our women engineers and really bringing them on that journey, because they don’t want to be treated any differently.
“They don’t want to be called out as being disadvantaged in any way, because they can do anything, but actually they come with a different set of skills and a different background, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do at AutoTrader. But we’ve got a lot to learn.”