9:39 am, January 15, 2022
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) ended 2021 with sales down by 1.2 per cent compared to the year before, but has said retail orders are at record levels and new car supply is set to improve in the coming months.
The firm – which is Britain’s largest carmaker – shifted 420,856 cars worldwide last year, which was a 1.2 per cent fall on 2020 – a year which itself was severely blighted by the pandemic.
Sales in 2021, particularly in the third quarter, were ‘constrained’ by the global semiconductor crisis, with the firm ‘proactively’ managing chip supplies to ‘maximise production of higher margin products’, a statement said.
However, JLR also said it has started to see ‘some improvement’ in chip supply, leading it to predict new car supply will improve in Q4 and to the end of the fiscal year, ending on March 31, 2022.
Retail orders across the globe are running at ‘record levels’, said the carmaker, with the total order bank currently sitting at over 154,000 units of which 30,000 are for the new Range Rover and 36,000 are for the Defender.
In fact, while total sales for the brand were down 1.2 per cent last year, Land Rover sales rose by 3.4 per cent with the Range Rover Evoque leading the way with 63,398 units, followed by the Defender at 63,134.
In the final three months of 2021, Range Rover sales were up by just shy of 92 per cent, Range Rover Sport sales rose by 64 per cent and by 34.5 per cent for the Jaguar I-Pace.
Lennard Hoornik, Jaguar Land Rover chief commercial officer, said: ‘Semi-conductor supply challenges continue within the industry but our wholesale volumes are improving.
‘We look forward to completing delivery to global customers as supply improves in 2022.’
