Aston Martin to cut 170 jobs as new CEO targets cost savings

Aston Martin said it will cut 170 jobs – amounting to 5% of its workforce – amid a drive by new CEO Adrian Hallmark to finally make the company consistently profitable. The cuts will save Aston Martin around £25 million a year, with the full effect seen in 2026, Hallmark told investors on its end-of-year results call today. The company announced a pre-tax loss of £289m for 2024, up from £240m the year before. Debt meanwhile swelled to over £1 billion. The redundancies “will affect all aspects of the business”, Hallmark said without being specific. All but 20 will be UK-based, the company told Autocar. The high savings versus the number of people affected implied the cuts fall heavily on higher-paid management, suggesting a clear-out at the top end, analyst Harry Martin from the bank Bernstein said on the call. The average savings per employee axed comes to £147,000, while the average salary of an Aston Martin employee was £49,000 in 2023, according to that year's company report. Aston Martin’s expenses under the leadership of former Ferrari CEO Amadeo Felisa included £1.2m spent on flights between 2022 and 2023 as he commuted from Italy, according to the company report. The flights were on a private jet, according to a report by Bloomberg. Felisa brought with him a team of former Ferrari executives to Aston Martin, including Vincenzo Regazzoni as chief industrial officer, Renato Bisignani as head of marketing and communications, Giorgio Lasagni as chief procurement officer and Roberto Fedeli as chief technical officer. All are still working for Aston Martin, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Hallmark was brought in to replace Felisa from Bentley last year and since starting in October has already taken steps to cut costs and balance production levels to demand, including reducing production to a single shift at its two plants. Sales to dealers in the first quarter of this year will fall to just 1000 cars, Aston Martin said, as it tries to clear a stock backlog of older models, particularly in China. It forecast a modest sales increase of around 5% in 2025, which would take the total number to around 6330, up from 6030 last year. Later in the year, numbers will be boosted by the first deliveries of the planned 999 units of the Valhalla mid-engined supercar. Aston Martin has struggled to hit targets set in previous years, including a forecast in 2022 to reach 10,000 sales by 2025, but Hallmark now says he is “not hung up on a specific figure on volume” but rather “the quality of business that we do”. The company is aiming for operational “boredom” this year after a tumultuous period in which the ambitious roll-out of new models including the DB12, Vantage and Vanquish was disrupted multiple times, costing “tens of millions”, Hallmark said. A more regular flow of production would help suppliers as well as the in-house team improve quality and cost, Hallmark said. “This is the core to being sustainably profitable in automotive,” he added. Hallmark told journalists in January that the situation at Aston Martin was “like a dream come true” compared with the problems he found when starting as CEO of Bentley, which was saddled with around £1.6bn of debt, compared with £1.1bn at Aston Martin. Aston Martin is forecasting a positive free cash flow (a measure of profitability) in the fourth quarter of 2025 and plans to be “sustainably positive” from 2026 with an operating margin of around 15%. “Our focus now will be on managing our cost base and enhancing productivity, continuing with a disciplined approach and rebalancing supply and demand,” Hallmark said. “I'm under no illusions that this task will be challenging."

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Aston Martin to cut 170 jobs as new CEO targets cost savings

Redundancies – 5% of the workforce – will save the loss-making luxury car maker around £25 million a year

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Aston Martin to cut 170 jobs as new CEO targets cost savings

Redundancies – 5% of the workforce – will save the loss-making luxury car maker around £25 million a year

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