Tata Motors loss doubles to Rs 3,680 crore over JLR woes

PUNE: Tata Motors, India’s largest commercial vehicle (CV) and fourth largest passenger vehicle (PV) manufacturer, on Thursday said its losses doubled to Rs 3,679.66 crore in the June quarter due to weakness in domestic as well as Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) volumes.

The Mumbai headquartered automaker had posted a loss of Rs 1,862.57 crore in the June quarter last year.

The firm’s British luxury car arm JLR posted a pre-tax loss of 395 million pounds compared to 264 million pound loss in the same period a year ago.

It was worst-than-expected loss at bottomline level as consolidated loss was estimated at Rs 2,127 crore and JLR loss at 236 million pound for quarter ended June 2019, according to a poll of analysts done by a TV channel.

Tata Motors overall revenue came in at Rs 60,830.16 crore, lower than Rs 65,956.78 crore in the same quarter last year.

The consolidated Ebitda margins fell 130 basis points to 6.2 per cent.

“The group’s financial performance reflects the historical seasonality and continued challenging market conditions globally,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

“The continued slow down across the auto industry due to weak consumer sentiments, liquidity stress and the impact of axle load effect particularly in medium/heavy duty, impacted overall demand,” Guenter Butschek, CEO and MD at Tata Motors, said.

He said over the past few years the company had struck a good balance between managing market dynamics and financial health. “However, this time, despite our continuous Turnaround effort we could not prevent some impact on our Q1 performance,” Butschek said.

However, the company retained its guidance saying project charge is on track to achieve 2.5 billion pound of profit and cash improvements by the end of the year.

With China stabilising and an exciting product line-up, JLR expects to return to growth soon and its financial results to improve over the balance of the year, it said.

“Despite challenging conditions in the first quarter, Jaguar Land Rover is creating a more robust and resilient business, in which we will continue to deliver a strong pipeline of products that our customers will love,” JLR Chief Executive Ralf Speth said.

He said breakthrough products such as the new Land Rover Defender will pave the way for sustainable profitable growth.

The company said JLR continued to benefit from the ongoing impact of its £2.5 billion profit and cash improvement programme, which delivered a further £100 million of cost-savings and £300 million reduction to previously planned investment in the quarter, taking the total savings to date to 1.7 billion pound.

Consolidated revenue during the quarter decl-ined by 7.8 per cent to Rs 61,467 crore YoY.

On standalone front, wholesales degrew by 22.7 per cent to 1,36,705 units and retail sales declined 12.6 per cent compared to year-ago with CV sales falling 19.5 per cent and PV down 30.1 per cent in Q1 year-on-year.