Around this time a couple of years ago, Jaguar was cutting production due to lack of demand. Then the pandemic hit, and I began to wonder how long for this world Jaguar was. Except it keeps hanging around amid the losses.
Jaguar Land Rover’s loss for the fourth quarter was only £9 million, the Financial Times reported Monday, which is good news for a company that was losing hundreds of millions in a quarter as recently as last year.
The group posted a £9m pre-tax loss between September and December. This compares to a £439m profit in the same period a year earlier, but is an improvement on the £302m loss it recorded between June and August.
Revenues rose from £3.9bn to £4.7bn in the quarter, though are below the £6bn posted in the same quarter a year earlier. The company now expects to break even in its financial year to the end of March.
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While most car companies have since seen order books swell to record levels because of supply constraints, JLR said its orders were also boosted by the new Range Rover, its flagship model. Car production was 41 per cent higher last quarter than in the preceding three months, the company said.
Elsewhere this week, Jaguar was seen getting a $670 million loan from the British government to help support EV development. This is a government that might not ever let it die, given how important Jaguar Land Rover is to the UK’s sense of national pride, or at least that of Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond.
Anyway, Jaguar is going all-electric by 2025 and upmarket as well, with cars in the six figures, a plan I actually like, given how irrelevant Jaguar has become in recent years. It’s long been past time to change the narrative about what Jaguar is.