Aston Martin accelerates away from its car-crash performance

Aston Martin has bounced back in the first half of 2021 after a car-crash of a year that wasn’t entirely the fault of Covid-19.

A disastrous IPO in late 2018 and an underwhelming performance, which resulted in it losing 90% of its market value inside 12 months, tarnished the brand and sent the manufacturer into a spin.

The group is now seeing progress on its strategy to be “one of the greatest ultra-luxury car brands in the world”.

The carmaker shifted 2,901 cars to wholesale in the six months to June, more than treble last year and almost back to 2019 levels.

It acheived revenues of £499m, which outperformed 2019, and its pre-tax loss of £90.7m was only £10m worse than two years ago. In the first half of 2020 the group lost £227m.

Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire Canadian businessman who took charge in early 2020, said: “When I joined Aston Martin just over a year ago, I had in mind key milestones that needed to be achieved to put the right foundations in place for the company’s future success.

“These have all been delivered, from appointing a world-class leadership team, to successfully rebalancing supply to demand and crucially strengthening the financial resilience of the business.”

Its transformation plan, Project Horizon, has the ambition of creating a wider portfolio and every new Aston after 2025 being an electric vehicle.

The plan has already seen the consolidation of all sports manufacturing into its site at Gaydon, Warwickshire, and a shift to a single production line.

It will start delivery of its hypercar Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro later this year while it also has high hopes for its first plug-in hybrid supercar, Valhalla.

Stroll, who is executive chairman, said: “The demand we see for our products, the new product pipeline and the quality of the team we have in place to execute, gives me great confidence in our continued success as we progress towards achieving our medium-term targets of 10k units, £2bn revenue and £500m of adjusted EBITDA, as we transform Aston Martin to be one of the greatest ultra-luxury car brands in the world.”

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