AMA’s CEO, chairman out amid capital raising for smash chain
The chairman and chief executive of Australia’s biggest smash repair chain, AMA Group, are leaving after a tumultuous period of pressure on earnings and the balance sheet.
The departures of AMA chairman Anthony Day and chief executive Carl Bizon were flagged in The Australian Financial Review’s Street Talk column on Thursday, with Melbourne-based AMA looking to raise up to $60 million.
Carl Bizon says he will remain a shareholder in AMA.
This latest heavily dilutive fundraising comes despite the board insisting 12 months earlier more capital was not required at AMA, which has almost 130 shops under brands including Gemini.
But Mr Bizon maintained his departure, taking effect after AMA’s annual general meeting in November, comes amid a turnaround and he would remain a shareholder.
“I was never going to be the journeyman, I was there to do a particular task of improving the company’s governance, take a strategic look at the business, and to see what my 40-odd years of industrial experience could bring to bear in terms of setting the company up for its future as a large-scale Australian listed business,” he told AFR Weekend.
“If people are putting money into the company [with this capital raising], they need a CEO who’s dedicated for the next three to five years to extracting the value around those things.”
AMA is a major provider of smash repairs to the insurance industry, with a large client being Brisbane-based Suncorp.
But AMA lost more than $320 million between 2020 and 2022 and has written down more than $200 million in goodwill from buying Suncorp’s Capital Smart repairs business. That period included COVID-19’s decimation on smash repair volumes and AMA being squeezed in long-term repair price contracts, which it
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