The appointment of Tata’s highly experienced chief financial officer, PB Balaji, to replace Adrian Mardell as CEO of JLR will always be remembered for the extraordinary intervention of US president Donald Trump.
The 47th president claimed, out of the blue and without the slightest justification for such incendiary remarks, that Mardell was leaving “in disgrace” and that Jaguar was in “absolute turmoil”.
If Balaji (pictured below), JLR’s first Indian CEO, didn’t already know he was facing a tough assignment, he certainly does now.
The sheer speed of the Balaji announcement makes it clear how anxious the Tata parent board must have been to get its hands directly on the reins of its cash-cow British subsidiary, which has recently been generating up to two-thirds of Tata’s total group revenue.
Balaji’s appointment was confirmed on Monday, just four days after Mardell’s departure announcement, even though JLR had originally intimated, with the mock calmness of routine corporate announcements, that the identity of a new CEO would be announced “in due course”. It is now perfectly clear that Tata felt there wasn’t a moment to lose.
There had already been ample warning that JLR’s recent excellent financial results were about to be torpedoed in the latest quarter by a dearth of Jaguars to sell and by the ill effects of rising US tariffs (which forced the brand to stop US exports in April amid the uncertainty). The latter looks especially serious since the Discovery and best-selling Defender are made in higher-tax Slovakia, not alongside the Range Rover in lower-tax Solihull.
It was also clear there would be no abatement in the new electric Jaguar turmoil of the past nine months, given that the Type 00 concept design was continuing to prove highly controversial and the recent news that the launch of production models would be postponed (along with that of the Range Rover Electric) because of a feared lack of demand for luxury EVs.
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The problem is that the Thierry Bollore plan was mad, insane, and has only gotten worse over time as it becomes clearer that there isn't a market for £100k EVs. And you can't squeeze 50,000 sales out of Bentley's 15,000 customers for a new Jaguar.
It was always crazy. The failing in the JLR board was not to see how crazy and instead of unanimously firing Bollore like Renault did, ebraced the daft idea.
The question is how can Balaji turn Jaguar around to start making cars again? Car that are able to be affordable and find a market for again? Because Bollore left a dumpster fire and Mardell didn't have an extinguisher.
Instead of taking Jaguar through hybrid period, and adding extra steps into the Jaguar brand (One Series / A Class rival), and properly setting up a performance varient for the brand, Bollore trashed everything. SVO should have been making true M car rivals, not out of reach Project 7 & 8. Think of a small hatchback Jaguar with an SV badge that brougth people into Jaguar, and one that got people looking at a time in their lives where they could start buying into Jaguar. That's what the plan should have been.
Not the Bollore plan to kill off Jaguar.
There's little evidence that a small Jaguar would be profitable, especially as JLR don't have a suitable platform for one. How on earth could the economies of scale be found?
However, allowing senior execs to publicly trash Jaguar was hardly a smart move either.
Who knows where they go from here, but it's clear the company cannot rely on diesel Defenders for ever. Alongside Jaguar, somehow replacing the Evoque and its sister models looks like a big headache.
The platform sharing is definitely a good question, and one that the likes of Audi answer by sharing with VW / Skoda / Seat etc. Mercedes by having various models based upon the same platform, and BMW with Mini.
It's a harder answer when it comes to Jaguar, but you also have the Evoke as a smaller platform, and you had the E-Pace. You've got to believe that some form of shared platform could have worked there. And if not, they really needed to make it work.
Failing that, partner with another brand to do a common platform. Again, plenty of examples where companies have had a joint venture to enable them to bring a model to the market.
I don't deny that Jaguar would have to modernise with an EV, and let's not forget they were one of the first premium brands with one in the I-Pace, just that their marketing department didn't have a clue what to do with it. Jaguar marketing has been awful, and that is before that terrible advert came out.
There's a lot of problems at JLR. Crazy that they did all the engineering on the C-X75 and didn't release it. That as a statement of what they could do was incredible and it would have beaten the Holy Trinity when they came out just slightly after it would have.
Jaguar's autopsy will have cause of death listed as incompetent management.