Greenlight.Com - Added Dealers In 31 States

ADDED DEALERS IN STATES (31 )

In July 2000 Greenlight.com added 10 dealer groups to its service. The largest was the Hendrick Automotive Group of Charlotte, North Carolina. With annual sales of more than $2.5 billion, Hendrick was ranked sixth by Automotive News among the top 100 dealer groups. Hendrick had 48 dealers with 61 franchises in nine states and the District of Columbia. Altogether, the 10 new dealer groups represented 130 dealers with 150 franchises in 14 states and D.C., bringing Greenlight.com 's total to 1,500 affiliated dealers in 31 states. None of the new dealers made any cash investments in Greenlight.com. However, they were made equity partners, which gave them the opportunity to earn equity shares in Greenlight.com based on their performance and the performance of Greenlight.com. Of Greenlight.com 's more than 1,500 affiliated dealers, nearly 900 had a "platinum" arrangement whereby they could earn stock in Green-light.com.

Manby predicted that Greenlight.com would have affiliated dealers in every state by the end of 2000. He claimed that Greenlight.com was reaching 75 percent of all e-commerce customers and about 45 percent of the total population. The company recently signed deals with e-loan.com and AutoTrader.com, both of which agreed to use Greenlight.com as their new-car partner; they provided links on their Web sites to Greenlight.com. In August 2000 Amazon.com announced it would begin selling cars on its Web site with a new link to Greenlight.com. The link, which would present automobile information in the familiar Amazon.com format, was part of Amazon's new ventures section. It gave Greenlight.com access to Amazon's growing customer base of 23 million Internet purchasers.

It was around this time that Greenlight.com received an additional $39 million in financing from investors, including Amazon.com, Techno-Venture Co., original investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and the Asbury Automotive Group, and others. The terms of Greenlight.com 's agreement with Amazon.com were changed. Instead of paying Amazon.com $82.5 million over five years, Greenlight.com agreed to pay $15.25 million over two years in exchange for being the exclusive new-car buying service on Amazon.com. The new terms were made in part because of the difficulty Internet firms were having in raising capital in 2000. The company's top management also changed, with CEO and co-founder Todd Collins becoming the firm's chief strategy officer. Manby replaced Collins as CEO, and Mark O'Neil, former division president of CarMax Inc., was hired as president and chief operating officer (COO). Greenlight.com also moved its headquarters from San Mateo to Livermore, California.