“It was the right time to do it,” says  putting an end to the Kontz family car saga. “In today’s car distribution business, my intuition is that you always have to be bigger and bigger. We didn’t want to keep getting bigger. When we [to the Swedish group Bilia] in 2016, it was to return to being a group on a human scale and concentrate on the British brands... even if we have grown a lot since then.”

In July 2020, the Luxembourg entrepreneur  (along the E411 motorway) as his first foreign venture. Today, the group employs nearly 200 people.

According to statistics on new registrations, the ambition to sell more than 1,000 cars a year from the four brands Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin and Lotus has largely been achieved, except for the post-covid years, when the figure is not very far off (919 in 2021 and 823 in 2022).

Louyet group continues to grow

The four brands--Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin and Lotus--will be sold to another Belgian family group, the Loyet Group, for an undisclosed sum. The Belgians will continue to operate the four brands on the Luxembourg sites. The handover is planned for 30 September 2024 and the dealerships will be operated from their current sites. All employees working at dealerships have been rehired and no restructuring is planned.

Headed by Laurent Louyet, the third generation of a family history that began in 1959 in Charleroi, the group has around twenty sales outlets. These sell mainly BMW cars and motorbikes and Mini, but the company also also runs a Rolls-Royce dealership and is an importer for McLaren and Pininfarina. According to the 2023 accounts, the company employed 603 people, generated sales of €666.5m and made a profit of €14m.

“I am very happy to continue the activities of this great family business,” said Louyet. “Expanding the activities of the Louyet group beyond the Belgian borders is an important step in our development and the integration of the prestigious English brands Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin and Lotus fits perfectly into the continuity of our current activities. I look forward to meeting the teams to create together a new stage in the annals of the extended Louyet family.”

“I’ve left a lot of things behind…”

“I’ve left a lot of things behind to concentrate on cars and sales processes over the years,” says Kontz, the fourth generation of the Kontz family. “It’s time to get back to basics. I’ve opened and will continue to run my two bicycle shops, an activity I really enjoy. I also really enjoy photography and birdwatching.”

“I asked myself for a long time whether I wanted to make my passions my profession or not,” he told Paperjam in a . He finally decided to separate the two and took over the family business Arnold Kontz.

In a book published to mark the , he recounted how his great-grandfather Arnold Kontz, a keen cyclist, started building and selling bicycles on Luxembourg’s Berlinerweg in 1917. At the height of cycling in Luxembourg in the 1970s, the family wasselling 4,000 to 5,000 bicycles a year.

This article was originally published in .