Britain's largest car maker, Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover, suffered a loss of £3.6 billion for the year ended March 31. The company has struggled with plunging demand in China – made worse due to the US-China trade war triggered by President Trump – and drivers ditching diesel cars since the Volkswagen emissions scandal emerged in 2015. Much of its range is diesel-powered.
JLR, which was bought by India's Tata Motors for £1.2 billion in 2008, said the situation is starting to improve. It made a £120 million profit in the last three months of the financial year. The company – which employs about 40,000 people in the UK – put this down to huge rounds of cost-cutting paying off after it announced plans to axe 4,500 jobs earlier this year.
Chief executive Ralf Speth said JLR – which also makes the luxury Range Rover models – has been one of the first companies in its sector 'to address the multiple headwinds simultaneously sweeping the automotive industry'. He claimed that JLR's turnaround plan has already saved £1.3 billion. Full-year revenue came in at £24.2 billion, down from £25.8 billion the year before. It sold 6 per cent fewer vehicles, or 578,915, which it put down to weakness in China.
But the company said it is seeing solid sales for several of its new cars, such as the Jaguar E-Pace and Range Rover Velar. Tata Motors' finance chief, Pathamadai Balachandran Balaji, said he expects Chinese sales of its sleek Jaguar saloons and Land Rover SUVs to return to growth later this year. JLR had made a profit of £1.5 billion in its previous financial year, 2017/18.
"We are taking concerted action to reduce complexity and to transform our business through cost and cash flow improvements. The company has returned to profitability in the fourth quarter and already delivered 1.25 billion pounds of efficiencies and savings," Speth added.
Product launches have included the new Jaguar XE, to be followed by the refreshed Discovery Sport and the new Land Rover Defender. JLR said it has also expanded its Ingenium engine family with the addition of a new high performance, low emissions six-cylinder petrol engine. The company intends to make around 2.5 billion pounds of investment, working capital and profit improvements by March 2020 through its Charge transformation programme. As part of the ongoing transformation programme, the company said it continued to invest in its manufacturing footprint.
JLR opened a new plant in Nitra, Slovakia producing the Land Rover Discovery and enhanced its state-of-the-art flexible manufacturing in Halewood, north-west England, for the new Range Rover Evoque. Plans have been announced to assemble electric drive units and battery packs in the UK and invest in the production of the next generation of flagship Range Rover models at Solihull, in the West Midlands. Work is underway at Gaydon nearby to centralise Jaguar Land Rover's automotive design and product engineering activities.
