Aston Martin desperately needed the DBX to be a hit, and you know what? It’s kind of working! It’s funny that it is that easy, just make a dumb SUV.
Aston released its first half results Wednesday, which showed revenue up a whopping 242 percent to £499 million, largely because of the DBX. Aston still reported an operating loss of £38 million, or about $52 million, but that was better than the first half of last year, when its operating loss was £159 million. Aston said the DBX sales were over half of its car sales in total, which totaled almost 2,901 for the first six months of this year.
It was all enough for Aston Chairman Lawrence Stroll to sound an optimistic note in Aston’s release:
Building on the success of DBX, our first SUV, we have since delivered two more new vehicles and with more exciting product launches to come we are well positioned for growth. The launch of Valhalla last week signals a new era for Specials at Aston Martin as an integral pillar of our brand and our product innovation
The demand we see for our products, the new product pipeline and the quality of the team we have in place to execute, gives me great confidence in our continued success as we progress towards achieving our medium-term targets of 10k units, £2bn revenue and £500m of adjusted EBITDA, as we transform Aston Martin to be one of the greatest ultra-luxury car brands in the world.
Aston’s tie-up with Mercedes, which got more serious last year, is another reason for Aston to feel that its future is bright, or at least stable in that it is unlikely to fall behind technologically. Next up for Aston is the aforementioned Valhalla and also the Valkyrie; I assume the still newish DBX will power the company in the meantime.
Investors did not react strongly to Aston’s earnings, as Aston’s stock posted only a mild gain today, and remains well down from when they went public. But this is still all a much better place than Aston was early last year, when it needed a fresh injection of capital just to shore up things short-term. I’m not sure that the world needs Aston more than it needs any other supercar maker, but some Brits are probably “chuffed” as they say this morning.