Earl Hesterberg
Management
Thanks, John. Related to our corporate development efforts, the company is pleased to announce the opening of four OEM granted add points. In November in the US, a new Acura dealership was opened in Sugarland, Texas, a suburb of Houston, which increases our total Houston area dealership count to 17. Also in November in Brazil, we opened a Toyota add point in the City of Sao Paulo, adjacent to our highest volume Honda dealership, which increases our Brazil dealership count to 18. In December in the UK we opened the Skoda add point in south and north of London, using a facility that our Land Rover franchise recently vacated. And finally in January in the US, we opened the Porsche dealership in El Paso, which brings our total dealership count in that market to 6. These acquisitions brought our total 2018 acquisition -- activity to 17 franchises, generating $615 million of annual revenues and our year-to-date 2019 acquisition activity to one franchise, generating $25 million in annual revenues. Since our last earnings call, we have also disposed of a Hyundai franchise in Kansas City, and a Mazda franchise in Houston. As well as terminated a Vauxhall franchise in the UK, and a Volvo franchise in Georgia. In total, these four franchises generated $65 million in trailing 12-month revenue. These dispositions are consistent with our strategy of disposing of underperforming assets and redeploying capital in ways that are beneficial to our shareholders. Finally, before I turn the call over to the operator for your questions, let me update our market outlook for 2019. For the US, we expect to see a slight pullback in the overall new vehicle industry. Total new vehicle sales in 2018 came in at 17.3 million units, a slight increase over 2017. We're anticipating a 2% decline in 2019 to around 17 million units. For the UK, the new vehicle industry declined 7% in 2018 from 2.5 million unit sales in 2017, down to less than 2.4 million units. We expect the market to continue on the same path in 2019 with another 5% to 10% decline, which would equate to industry sales of around 2.2 million units. We believe that our brand exposure, combined with the improved performance of our recent acquisitions will allow us to outperform the industry. And for Brazil, the market improved more than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. Industry unit sales increased from 2.2 million to 2.5 million units, a gain of nearly 14%. Given the positive signals we're seeing in the economy, we expect this trend to continue with an increase of another 10% or so to around 2.75 million units. This concludes our prepared remarks. I'll now turn the call over to the operator to begin the question-and-answer session. Operator?