New online auction site to shake up plant sector

23 January 2012

Having built up a market leading position in the vehicle salvage industry over the past eleven years, online auction business, Bluecycle, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aviva, has launched into the plant and machinery sector with its new brand, Bluecycle Plant.

Offering a unique business model that enables sellers to list equipment for free, Bluecycle Plant’s round-the-clock auctions ensure that depreciation is minimised, enabling the potential for increased returns for plant hire businesses and private sellers. The company will list all types of equipment and machinery on a dedicated new website - www.bluecycleplant.com

Bluecycle Plant has joined forces with Steve Worthington, owner of plant and equipment broker, WorthiPlant (www.worthiplant.com) for the sourcing of stock and both partners expect significant interest from European buyers.

Some 20,000 man hours of technical development has been invested in Bluecycle Plant’s new auction architecture, which features unique ‘push bidding’ technology, developed in-house, so that bids can be made instantly without the user having to refresh the browser page.

The new website enables registered users to bid from several different pages and search for items closest to a particular location or those newly listed, as part of a brand new secondary search option. To identify items in auctions which are soonest to close, the company has also introduced a ‘carousel’, which rotates every five seconds.

Commenting on Bluecycle’s entry into the plant and machinery sector, Guy Spence, Managing Director, said:

“Already used to operating in highly competitive and fast moving industry, Bluecycle Plant has been developed through innovation and the launch of our new auction technology. Our new association with WorthiPlant is a major step forward in our ambition to add value to customers in new markets and we are looking forward to bringing our energy, expertise and proven business model to this sector.”

Steve Worthington, Owner, WorthiPlant, said:

“This new partnership will offer the international plant sector with an industry leading sales platform. Our respective expertise and business model will offer an extremely competitive end to end proposition.”