NEW DELHI: Tata Motors, India’s top vehicle group, yesterday reported a tripling of quarterly net profit as a sterling performance by British luxury brand Jaguar Land Rover offset dismal domestic sales.
Tata Motors, recovering from the apparent suicide of managing director Karl Slym who was driving the firm’s attempted domestic turnaround, said consolidated net profit soared to Rs 48.1bn ($771m) in the three months to December from Rs 16.3bn a year earlier.
The surging performance comes on the back “of strong demand, growth in volumes and favourable product mix” at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the company said. JLR’s profit more than doubled to £619m ($1.01bn).
JLR’s sales have been propelled by the launch of the new Range Rover Sport, the new Range Rover and the Jaguar F-TYPE.
Tata Motors has become heavily reliant on revenues from JLR, which it bought for $2.3bn from Ford in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis.
The purchase, seen by auto analysts at the time as a risky gamble, has paid off dramatically with the iconic luxury brands accounting for virtually all of Tata Motors’ profit. The vehicle giant, which also makes the ultra-cheap Nano hatchback, announced that total revenue for the third financial quarter — including JLR — jumped 38.6 percent to Rs 638.77bn from a year earlier.
But sales of domestic-led commercial and passenger vehicles for the quarter fell 36 percent for the quarter to 1.32 million units from a year earlier. Revenue from Tata Motors’ local operations slid to Rs 77.7bn from Rs 106.30bn. However, the domestic arm of Tata Motors swung to a profit of Rs 12.5bn in the third quarter from a loss of Rs 4.6bn, lifted by a one-off gain.
Slym was struggling to put the domestic operations of Tata Motors back on the road to profit when he fell to his death last month from the upper storey of a Bangkok hotel. AFP
