An audience with Aston Martin executive chairman Lawrence Stroll is always a memorable occasion.
Most will know the Canadian from Netflix’s Drive to Survive series, in which he's straight-talking and has a fearsome presence, often wearing the look of a man who you’ve just told you’ve run over his cat. In person, he’s far warmer; he sparks a room into life and always remains at the centre of it.
The ‘executive’ part of his job title remains an understatement for how hands-on he is, as an audience with Stroll in Aston’s sleek boardroom in Gaydon last week again revealed.
On the product side, Stroll talked about EVs; Aston has pushed back plans to launch its range of electric cars to 2027, due to a slowdown in demand, and increased investments in PHEVs as a result. The rush to legislate in favour of EVs was “obviously premature”, according to Stroll.
Yet he was also in a reflective mood as he approached his four-year anniversary in his role and he said he was “very proud of the industrial as well as financial turnaround” experienced at Aston in that time. By the end of this year, Aston’s four model lines will all be less than a year old (“dealers will have four new products in a year when it has been four in 10 years before”) and the company has been refinanced to cover the next seven years.
Yet the share price is still around half that of when Stroll took over, itself well down on Aston’s original listing. This irks him. “Our share price is hugely undervalued,” he said.
He made a comparison between Ferrari, which sells around 13,000 cars per year, has a Formula 1 team and has a market cap of close to €80 billion, and Aston, which Stroll conservatively plans to sell 10,000 cars per year in the next couple of years, has an F1 team and has a market cap of around €1.5bn…
Yet he thinks Aston’s time will come, and 2025 will be the time to really judge the company when it has all its new models on the market and its new retail model fully in play for those cars.
Stroll has switched Aston away from a wholesale model, when it previously built just 7% of cars to order to above 60% last year, even with an ageing product range. Cars have more options and more bespoke content, thus are more profitable.
Aston is only really delivering the DB12 at the moment, pending the arrival of the revised Vantage, DBX and DBS models. Stroll said this was “financially painful” but the company would “not stuff the market with old cars”, which would hurt profitability. “Dealers are complaining about low inventories, but I’d rather have pent-up demand,” he said.
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