One of the popular newspapers in the country "The Namibian" - in it's edition from 2017-11-24 released an article by Ndama Nakashole "NaCC's clamp on Namcars ups market options" in which it is stated that the reason for the fact that the Auto Dealership ratio has decreased on our website from 72 to 49 Auto Dealers thanks to "hard work" of NaCC - is a lie.

And it is also is a lie that some Kahn Mohammed is the manager of NamCars.net

Mr. Mohammed Kahn has nothing to do with NamCars.net and it is very sad that such big newspaper as "The Namibian" is allowing themselves to publish information without checking their sources.

I personally messaged the author of the article Ndama Nakashole and denied this information, but Ndama Nakashole was only interested in the name of the owner of the website NamCars.net and ignored the facts of lies in her own article.

As an international company we are open to working and communicating with people disregarding their race, nationality or religion as long as they are reliable and trusted partners. But the fact is that there are no people from middle-east in my company. No employees, no funders, or shareholders. We are Ukrainian developers, with Spanish, and Belgian team members, and local partners in countries where Dealer Login is represented.

As for the number of Auto Dealers, it decreased not because of NaCC's "hard work", but because the Pupkewitz Group is forced to use their own new website and prohibited to use NamCars.net. Despite the complaints of the managers of such branches themselves - they are not allowed to publish their inventory on NamCars.net any longer.

The second reason for the decrease in the number of Auto Dealers is the closure of the Dealer Login branch in Namibia, which serviced 5-6 Auto Dealers only, who for various reasons did not want to take photos on their own and demanded assistance. And as a result, such dealers have ceased to use our service, but again - it is not because NaCC performed it's work.

For whatever reason “The Namibian” has published false information, whether is was impermissible negligence not to verify information, or deliberate misrepresentation of readers and users of NamCars.net in order to harm the service in favor of the competitor, NamCars.net fairly demands from “The Namibian” public apology and refutation of false information. 

Andriy Bondar 

Dear Martha Hawanga CEO of NCC!

The owner of NamCars.net is Ukrainian citizen, and I am not permitted to give the name unless the legal court of law will enforce me. This is the law in Ukraine unfortunately, and it's called Personal data protection law.

I am also not authorised to speak on behalf of NamCars.net, because I am only providing technical and marketing support, and currently I am giving to you only my personal impression, and opinion what is going on, and legal owner of NamCars.net might not be agree with me:

Did I understand you right that you don’t care about the truth, and all what you want is to shut down namcars.net by any price by using the power which government gave to you?

You should be clearly aware that prohibiting dealers to advertise on namcars.net which located and registered outside of Namibia is out of your jurisdiction, and you are taking advantage of car dealerships fear, and limited knowledge of their rights.

Why you don’t prohibit Namibian citizens to use Facebook or Google ?

Why you don’t prohibit Namibian citizens to use booking.com, airbnb.com, ebay.com, birorbuy.co.za and 100’ of other website which do not publish telephone numbers unless you submit the E-mail?

Why Namibian domain name registrant is charging for registering .com.na domain name N$ 995,00 for Namibian company and N$ 17,227 ($1,164 USD ) for the foreign registrant?

Does it look to you like fair trading conditions? Why you don’t do anything about this?

http://www.info.na/domain

This is very unfair, and most expensive domain name in the world, but we can not do anything about this, and this is one more reason why we had moved to .net - because everything in Namibia is unfair.

Why you are ignoring that fact and NamCars.net never was blocking the dealers for advertising on other sites, only hiding telephone numbers?

You don’t hear and read our mails and statements or you just making visibility of it?

And you should be also aware, that prohibiting advertising on NamCars.net during all period of investigation would basically meaning destroying the business, because if it took you 3,5 years to investigate until this point, it might take another 3,5 years to finalise the investigation, and obviously none of the dealers would really wait for so long.

And “accidentally” Republikein is started to advertise cars by themselves on their website by making partnership with Namibian portal www.my.na. And "accidentally” again - you publish the public notice in that newspaper for the whole page big.

Did Republiken publish it for free? or gave you discount for it? or did you pay full price by the money of Namibian tax payers?

But In Ukraine we call it “Hijacking the business" and its going on in Ukraine for the past 20 years, and trust me, I have very big experience to resit this type of “Hijacking” - this is my personal impression about what are you trying to do now, and the legal owner of NamCars.net might not be agree with me.

If not - then explain to me:

Where is Cars Namibia cc website right now?

http://www.cartrader.com.na - is expired for not paying the renewable fee.

So where is your “competitor”?

SHOW ME HIS WEBSITE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ON 23.07.2016 - Cars Namibia cc - Does not exist on internet!!!!!!!!!

And the most important thing:

What are your demands???

If its to show the phone numbers for all dealers, despite that fact where they advertise - it is fine!

And from today NamCars.net will show all telephone numbers of all dealers, does not matter where they advertise, But I still believe that you exceed your authority, but I have neither the strength nor the desire to meet with you in the courts. 

I’ll forward this E-mail to the all subscribed car dealers as well, that they are aware of my statement and my communication with you.

Andriy Bondar 

One of  the main aspects in our business policy is prohibiting of advertising vehicles which are not currently available on the dealership yard or just sold out. But some of Mauritian dealers are so upset about this, that they allow themselves even personal insults toward to administration of our project. Well! Let me try to make it clear, and I hope that understanding of our concept will finally cross the mind some of the most complicated MU car dealers.

The first of all, we are in the market for our users, and only then for our costumers. This is our corporate politic, we stiсk to it very strongly. Because the biggest disappointment for our user is an attempt to mislead them, or waste of their time, which might be considered by them this way if we advertise something which is not yet available.

Yes, I understand that it saves your money and makes things very easy, as no need to invest your own money and you can work with clients money instead. But the problem is that people are buying used cars under influence of emotions, and they don’t want to wait. They want it right now, and right here, and even willing to overpay for it.

And finally ask yourself! If we have most popular website in Mauritius for selling used cars. Why do we actually need you "a local dealer"? Can’t we just make a deal with some Japanese or UK company and start to sell cars by ourselves? And tomorrow we would have 10,000 cars to offer! What is the difference for a final customers if currently you are doing the same? Trust and reputation? - I think we have enough of it.

The only reason why we still don’t do it, because this is not our business. We advertise other people’s cars and happy about it. We respect them, by filtering junk and rubbish proposals, and they respect us, by visiting our network continuously more and more.

Dmitry Mazuryk

When I was beginning my “adventure” into the market of vehicle sales in South Africa, I had to deal with a complete lack of education of my potential clients in the internet sector generally. Any attempt to convince a car dealer to try our service, even if free of charge, was ending up in complete failure.

Dealers would tell me:

“I am running my business for about 30 years. I know everybody around, and everybody knows me. I have paid a lot of money to the best IT company in South Africa to make my own website. And then you bloody “Russian”, who cannot even speak proper English, are coming to me and telling me that I am stupid, and that I don’t know to run my business?”

What could I say in return, considering the fact that I am not even Russian, and that they were really very uneducated about how the internet really works. They strongly believed, that by paying “big bucks” for their own website, this was good enough to make their company successful on the web. And given the fact that there was nothing to compare with - they were quite happy, and any attempt to educate them a little bit more was taken by them as an insult.

In 2006, my technology was really revolutionary in the South African market, and on the way to success stood only two things: very conservative customers, and corporate corruption in big companies. There are many informational materials on the web about South African conservative mentality, so no need for me to repeat this here. They are people who do not attach importance to being punctual, can never say no, they will always “think about it” and always do it with such unrealistic politeness.

The corruption present in big vehicle sales companies looked like this:

“I am not sure what you are saying here, let me ask what our IT department thinks about it”

Do you think that an IT department for a dealership company would actually would agree to buying IT services from another company, even if my concept is infinitely better? Of course not. That would make them all unemployed. And looking at all this from within and understanding the underpinnings of what is happening - I could not handle my emotions and become irate with my potential customers, which were standing behind the backs of such “IT departments” and did not want to listen to any arguments, which I believed to be unfair.

Having a great success online - I failed on the field however, due the human factor and mentality difference, which I had not previously considered a serious threat to my business before. Therefore I have been forced to leave all operations of the ground, and to dedicate myself strictly on online maintenance of the business, by leaving offline operation to my local partners, who went to the extent of prohibiting me to talk to any of their client directly :)

Remember! I am talking about 2006, when not all dealers had even electricity on their yard, not to mention a PC or an internet connection, many of them were still using calculators. Therefore 90 % of effort and resources we were spending on education of our potential customers, instead of development and marketing of our project online. The experience of trying to educate some potential customers by myself, versus employing people we found in “Gumtree”, whom we offered a small salary, commissions and sent them to the field without much training and knowledge of the concept. And for this reason, what could have been done by me personally in half a year, salaried personnel took five years to achieve, which affected the reputation of the whole of our enterprise campaign and the success of the overall market in South Africa. 

Our sales representatives did not know by themselves, what they ware actually selling, and I had no authority according to our agreement with local partners to get involved on it in anyway. I was sad, I was "crying", but could not do much about it. My " blue dream" was destryoned by a bannal human factor whcih I failed to keep in the mind. 

However, our project is alive and profitable, despite all of the above. And this fact, I am always commenting as follows:

It does not work due our efforts, but in spite of our mistakes.

Andriy Bondar 

The destiny brought us to the Philippines accidentally. It happened when my partner and friend Diego Alonso van Camp mentioned that his brother has a family there, and it would be great for him to give some business opportunity for his brother. Suchwise in March 2011 we had launched the project in the Philippines, despite my statements about the madness of such adventures…

It took us 3 years, to get all car dealers in Namibia which has population only 2,300,000 people. And I was trying to imagine how long it would take to get in all car dealers with population more than 90,000,000 people. If we would have the same scenario like in Namibia, we would need:

90,000,000/2,300,000 =

= 39 Years to reach the same popularity and same quantity of vehicles proportionally to Namibia.

It were really not good numbers, but my “mad” friend Diego decided to go ahead and I did not have a much choice and had to follow him and support as a friend.

A particularity of Asian vehicle market was very surprising, and did not look like anything else, that we met in Africa. It turned out that the main transport in the Philippines are motorcycles and scooters, and automobile segment of the market applies more to Luxurious instead of middle-class market.

There were many car yards with hundreds of used cars in it, but the business model of Auto Exchanges was creating conflict of interest with any kind of publicity. Because for any Auto Exchange which makes their income by renting a space and charging for it on a daily basis - any vehicle publicity was giving them an economical damage and profit lost.

Of course there were exceptions and we met "advanced" owners of Auto Exchanges, who was not considering a vehicle advertising as a threat for their business, but in most cases they were not so happy to see us, and we had to deal directly with owners of the cars - a decision makes. And a real "Hell" was about to come, when were trying to get hold of all those guys who was owning 3-5-10 cars and close the deal with them.

You are coming to a car yard, and you see not a car owner, but “a car taker”, who is not authorised to make any decision, and his job is to keep car nice and clean, and open car doors for any potential customer, who is instructed do not give a contact number to anybody unless its a buyer.

Just imagine how long it would take to get 200 cars online from guys who owns no more 3-5-10 cars - you need to convince 30-50 people in order to get it done. And then compare with an effort to close the deal with a manager of a used car dealership yard, where only one person can make a decision to get all his 200 cars online.

There are some "normal" car dealerships as well, but not much and mainly a used car market represented by Auto Exchanges, and the effort to get them is just incomparable to anything which we had to deal with in the past. In most cases, working with a small car holders - is the work for the sake of work, and if we manage to reach an agreement and, in the long term it becomes very rare.

However, after 5 years on the market, our project became a leading source of customers for car sellers in the Philippines. Even No 1 online classified in the country - generates less “leads” then our network.

How do we know it?

We posted the same amount of cars to No 1 online classified in the Philippines, and the same amount of cars to our network. After one month of advertising we got from classifieds only a spam such as newsletters, but from our network it was dozens of 100 % of pure vehicle enquiries.

Thus, we have proved the ineffectiveness of advertising on the general classifieds. It looks like none goes to search for a car to a general classified, and every one prefer classifieds, which are focusing purely on a vehicle sales. Yes, they might have more traffic, much more, but I can assure you - we are selling more cars then any general classified in the country despite their top popularity.

One thing is to make it popular, and other to monetize it. We crossed the line, where our project stopped “eating” our money, and at least its paying for it self, but we are still struggling to make some profit out of our enterprise.

We have denied however a proposal of $600,000 USD from one of our competitors to leave the Philippine market.

Lets see……

Andriy Bondar