Jaguar Land Rover eyes China to clock £3bn profit in five years

BRITAIN’s largest automotive employer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has said that it targets an annual turnover of £30 billion and profits of £3 billion within five years.

The carmaker reported a more-than-doubling of sales in China between January and March. Sales in China of 111,000 units represented a year-on-year increase of 23 per cent and accounted for more than 25 per cent of all deliveries, reported The Times.

Moreover, China is the only growth market for the company in a pandemic-affected year.

In the recent past, JLR was hit by the collapse of sales in China during trade wars with the US during the Trump presidency, and consumers and regulators turning their back on diesel engines, once the stock-in-trade of the group’s production.

The total full-year deliveries of JLR fell by 13 per cent to 439,000, making it a smaller production company than Tesla. Those volumes meant a similar drop in revenues to £19.7bn, on which it claimed underlying profits of £662m, The Times report added.

It is before the £1.5bn costs of its redundancy programme and the writedowns on its investment projects, including its abortive attempt to turn its Jaguar XJ executive car into an electric vehicle.

The one-off costs sent JLR, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors of India, to losses for the year of £861 million.

Currently, the group is embarking on the design and engineering of a range of fully electric cars by 2025.

JLR on Tuesday (18) predicted that it should make underlying profits of about £840m on sales of £21bn in the year to next March, rising to £3bn on sales of £30bn by the financial year to March 31, 2026.

Detailed 2020-21 volume figures showed a 31 per cent crash in Jaguar sales to 97,700. Range Rover sales fell by 18 per cent to 213,000, while there were 23 per cent fewer Land Rover Discovery vehicles sold. Those were offset by a first full year of sales of the new Slovakia-built Land Rover Defender, which came in at 45,200, The Times report added.

Tata Motors announced a $1 billion loss on Tuesday despite a strong performance in the first quarter of 2021 as restructuring costs related to JLR hit the automaker's bottom line.