12:54 pm, July 30, 2021
Bentley has finished H1 2021 by posting a record profit, even beating its previous full-year record.
The British brand recorded an operating profit of €178m (£151m) as it bounced back from a difficult pandemic-hit year.
In 2020, it saw revenue of €860m (£732m) but profit of -€99m (-£84m).
For the first half of this year, however, revenue was up to €1.32bn (£1.1bn) with a record return on sales of 13 per cent.
The previous record half-year performance came in 2014, when the first had revenue of €887m (£755m) and profit of €95.2m (£81m).
Sales were split evenly across the firm’s three models, with the Bentayga selling 2,767 units, the Continental GT shifting 2,318 units, and the Flying Spur 2,063 units.
There was a similarly even split in the firm’s most popular sales regions, with the Americas and China, Hong Kong and Macau both seeing just over 2,000 sales each. Europe followed behind in third with 1,142.
Adrian Hallmark, Bentley’s chairman and CEO, said: ‘These results are an important milestone on our mission Beyond100, namely to become the leading sustainable luxury mobility company by 2030.
‘They are the outcome of favourable market conditions, combined with three years of hard work within Bentley, where we have reinvented our products, restructured our operations, managed three crises, and defined our 2030 strategy.
‘We have worked relentlessly to transform our entire organisation through productivity improvements and cost efficiencies, and the double-digit return on sales is validation that we are on the right path to enable a sustainable business model.’
However, the company warned that there was still plenty of uncertainty for the second half of the year, with increasing Covid numbers in some regions threatening future production or sales opportunities.
Hallmark added: ‘While we celebrate these results, we are not taking the full year outlook for granted as we know there are still sizable risks to the year-end, notably the increasing number of colleagues having Covid-enforced self-isolation periods.’
