I am not certain it is dead.
I believe that the short term view is red fringed and certainly carries risk.
It will come down to how well they can bring in fresh customers against a very tedious looking competitive marketplace? If you get them in once you have a three year window (on a PCP). Three years plus opening new outlets in different countries would show well for fresh sales as well, it would probably have been a goal of the old team at a guess. It makes common sense to sell outside the EU/UK as this avoids the max 1000 limit as I understand it?
If you can bring enough fresh opportunities in then you can cover a higher churn rate than they have had in the past. Also lets not forget the Aero was a truculent child with a higher price tag and different product profile. Hmm maybe not a good indicator given the way it is being treated now.
If they did spin off the Trad as a package Lotus 7 - Caterham style that would also allow a margin cut to keep the lights on.
InvestIndust (II) has shown an interest in high end automotive with Aston so it is not a random move by them I guess ? They have also used a separate fund if I remember correctly from the press releases. It would prove interesting to see the fund guidance documents in case they show any term for the investments (1, 5, 10 years etc) as there are some hard points coming up in the car market with BEV, ICE, Euro7 and a vast array of nanny features to remove your right to drive your car. None easy to implement with odd shaped wings and grills in cars low to the ground.
I could take a cynical view and say that they need to flip this pretty quickly or they will have to go through the investment hungry development stages to integrate new electric power and safety tech into the models to show a forward projection. This is pretty close in the UK market thanks to the morons that lead us, 2030 not long in car terms. So if they want to be in, ramp up the spreadsheet and then cash out we will need to see some fast dancing. You could always hire in some people who have done just that before right?
Last edited by Alistair; 20/07/23 11:50 AM.
