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50 ‘product actions’ in Jaguar Land Rover’s £15bn 5-year plans

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8 June 2016

TATA Group’s Jaguar Land Rover’ £15bn 5-year plans include 50 ‘product actions’ to maintain the surge that made it the UK’s biggest car and SUV maker last year.

It is to invest £3bn in each of the next five years in yet more facilities and range-broadening products.

No niche of the UK’s business car sector will be left unexplored in the plans, which include what JLR’s UK business and fleet general manager Jon Wackett describes as 50 “product actions”.

Jaguar Land Rover's £15bn 5-year plans
Jon Wackett

He and UK managing director Jeremy Hicks refuse to be more specific about the strategy aimed at achieving “truly sustainable long-term growth”, according to  Mr Hicks.

The latter, during his four-year tenure after leaving Audi, has already seen JLR leap from 12,000 to 38,000 employees worldwide and output reach a record 520,000 vehicles last fiscal year on the back of investments totalling £12bn over the period.

He was speaking inside one of JLR’s biggest single, ongoing investments – its Wolverhamption diesel and petrol engine production facility opened last year on which £500m has already been spent, with a further £500m in the pipeline .

Fuelled by new vehicles such as the Jaguar XE and F-Pace, and Land Rover’s Discovery and Range Rover Evoque, sales growth in the business car sector has been, and continues, spectacular. While the UK’S all-important contract hire and leasing section last year grew by 23%, JLR’s increase was 75%.

Mr Wackett is projecting a yet further 50% rise in JLR’s business sector sales this year

In this year’s first quarter the sector slackened to 11% year-on-year growth – but JLR’s business was 115% higher. Within the JLR total, Jaguar was running  194% higher, against Land Rover’s more modest 53%.

Mr Wackett is projecting a yet further 50% rise in JLR’s business sector sales this year – “but of course we wouldn’t expect that growth level to continue.”

He continued: “These past two years we could achieve that level of growth, driven by the new product we had like the XE and new XF.  But it’s a bit like an aircraft taking off – you quickly take off and then you slow down and start levelling out.

“So it was 50% in 2014 as well as 50% in 2015, and will be another 50% this year. But then it will level off. It won’t plateau but it will slow down. We started from a low base but we can’t  later  jump from 30,000 straight to 45,000 in a year; it’s just not feasible.

“I could do volume tomorrow; but I could be a hero for six months and thereafter we would be just trying to keep up.”

Jaguar Land Rover's £15bn 5-year plans
The JLR engine manufacturing plant at Wolverhampton that has had a £500m investment with another £500m in the pipeline

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