The DBX Saved Aston Martin From A Catastrophic 2020

Aston Martin is one of the most iconic British sports car manufacturers ever, and with the help of vehicles like the DBX SUV, the company has been doing its best to remind people that it still exists and is still relevant. Despite returning to Formula One and forging new partnerships, the brand has a lot of work to do to catch up with its competitors. 2019 was a bad year for the brand, and unfortunately, things haven’t been much better in 2020. While other automakers bounced back from the effects of the global pandemic towards the end of the year, Aston did not.

The purveyor of James Bond’s most beautiful cars recorded 4,150 retail sales in 2020, a massive drop of 32 percent over the already poor form of 2019. Wholesale volumes dropped too: sales to dealers dropped a whopping 42 percent from 5,862 units in 2019 to just 3,394. Thus, annual revenue declined to around $866 million from a little under $1.4 billion the year before. This equated to an operating loss of over $450 million. But it’s not all bad news, as these figures include the $139 million that was spent on “adjusting operating items, largely the impairment of capitalized R&D due to technology and cycle plan changes”.

That DBX also helped to offset some of this negativity by making up more than a quarter of total sales in the final three months of the year with 1,171 units sold. This made Q4 the brand’s strongest quarter of the year. Aston also reports that it saw a gain of three percent in quarterly revenue growth and ended with a total cash reserve of over $693 million, up from December 2019’s figure of almost $153 million. Aston attributes this improvement to “refinancing to strengthen financial resilience and support growth ambitions“. For the sake of seeing beautiful cars on the road, we truly hope that Aston can go from strength to strength this year.