Aston Martin is back on the road and according to its executives will hit its income goals for the year, but the bottom line remains stubborn loss.
After a first full calendar year of sales of the £ 150,000 DBX, Aston’s rival Range Rover, and clearing of sales blockages in the sales floor of its £ 120,000 Vantage sports cars, the company tripled sales to more than 2,901 vehicles in the first six months of the Year, which increased revenue by a similar factor to £ 498 million.
The positive news for a company that has specialized in bad news since its catastrophic £ 4.4 billion IPO in 2018 continued the recent rally at London’s only publicly traded automaker. In morning trading, the stock rose 47p to 19.29p to value the company at £ 2.2 billion. After a downtrend in the summer, the stock has gained 12 percent in the past 14 days.
After several refinances since going public to avoid collapse through bankruptcy eight, the company, with factories in Warwickshire and South Wales, is now controlled by Lawrence Stroll, a Canadian billionaire who is also funding Aston’s revival in Formula 1 motorsport. The German Mercedes-Benz automobile group Daimler also has a 20 percent stake after it provided the technology with which Aston Martin cars will increasingly be operated electrically from the middle of the decade.
The results in the first half of 2021 are again above the pre-pandemic year 2019.
Its ebitda profit – operating profit before borrowing costs, depreciation and taxes – was 49 million ebitda.
The bottom line, however, is still deeply in the red at £ 90 – albeit an improvement over the first half of 2020 when the figure was still £ 227 million. In 2019, the pre-tax loss was £ 80 million.
The improvement in 2021 was due to sales of 1,595 DBX, which accounted for 55 percent of all volumes, as well as lifting a crushing supply-demand mismatch on its sports cars, which meant lowering prices and incentivizing dealers to clear had to be the volume backlog. At a balanced level, Aston was able to double the number of sports car sales.
The company is targeting $ 10,000 by mid-decade with sales of £ 2 billion and EBITDA of £ 250 million.
Ken Gregor, former Jaguar Land Rover finance director who now does the same job at Aston Martin, said the business will be sustained profitable at some point in the journey between now and then.
Contributing to this are higher-margin products such as the £ 2 million Valkyrie Hypercar and the £ 580,000 plug-in hybrid Valhalla and the eventual reissue of the Vanquish as a so-called mid-engine sports car that is supposed to compete with Ferraris 488.
Stroll personally funds the Aston Martin F1 racing team, in which his son Lance is one of the drivers. The fine print in Aston Martin’s publicly traded corporate accounts shows that it pays the F1 team about £ 25 million annually in marketing rights, including providing Aston road cars to Lance Stroll and his fellow driver Sebastian Vettel.
The post DBX puts Aston Martin sales back on track first appeared on monter-une-startup.
