Lotus breaks sales record, posts £594m loss
Delivering 6,970 cars in 2023 sets a new benchmark, but Lotus has much work still to do
The last time we wrote about Lotus sales figures, it was under the shadow of 200 proposed job losses as the manufacturer sought to ‘restructure’ in the face of a £145.1m loss. Off the back of a bumper start to 2023, it suggested at the time that its short-term forecast was much rosier - and this has come to pass. It has just released full-year results which confirm that it achieved revenues of $679m (or £538m) having delivered 6,790 cars in the last 12 months, the most in its 76-year history. But it also posted a net loss of $750m (or £594m).
Nevertheless, Lotus insisted the ‘results reflect steady progress in the Company’s execution of its Vision80 strategy’ - a strategy which anticipated annual sales of 150,000 cars by 2028. Needless to say, it was largely predicated on the success of an incoming lineup of new all-electric vehicles, and in this respect at least the firm can point to the early impression made by the launch of the Eletre last year. Already 63 per cent of its deliveries were battery-electric models, as production ramped up in the second half of the year. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Lotus recorded a 92 per cent increase in revenue and a 110 per cent increase in deliveries to 3,749 cars.
Additionally, in February of this year, Lotus celebrated its public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), which, according to comments made by its CFO, is said to have raised in the region of $880m (or £697m). At the time, the manufacturer insisted that it was ‘ideally positioned to seize the tremendous opportunity in the fast-growing and underserved luxury EV market’. Unsurprisingly, the launch in September of Lotus’s first ‘hyper-grand tourer’, the Emeya, was identified as a key signifier of its progress, with first deliveries said to have begun in China last month. European buyers will have to wait till at least the third quarter of 2024.
Lotus made no specific mention of the Emira in its rundown, except to acknowledge that ‘sportscars’ still account for 1,150 of the deliveries it made in the final quarter of 2023 - itself a 29 per cent increase on the previous three months (good news for anyone still waiting to see their car). Back in December, we reported that the i4 derivative had been delayed till this summer, and just last month Lotus confirmed that the Emira had finally been certified by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), meaning that it ought to start finding its way to American customers. The Eletre is primed to launch in the US later this year, too, as Lotus targets a threefold increase in deliveries in 2024. That would get it to around 26,000 and another sales record. But Lotus has a long way to go to ‘become [the] all-electric, intelligent and luxury mobility provider’ at the scale it envisaged reaching before its 80th anniversary.
I think I’ll invest elsewhere.
As above, I am also not convinced about that 150k by 2028 but hope I'm proven wrong.
This could go really well for Lotus (huge investment from Geely, huge BEV market in China, 20x growth = easy) or really bad (Chinese consumers don;t want to pay for Lotus "badge" and shun the Brand, Geely looses interest and uses Lotus purely as an engineering resource for sales outside of Europe and to enhance their own vehicles and stops manufacturing of Lotus brand)
I have no idea where between the two bookends this is likely to end as the BEV market (and whole car market) is going through such an unstable period at the moment
I have to say Geely have been a patient owner of Volvo so far which points to a relatively good future for Lotus
Personally, I would go for the Emira with the V6 manual. But for a family, I think the Eletre is a great proposition.
And regarding the ambition to scale from 7 to 150k units per year: Don't forget that Lotus - as Volvo and Polestar - belongs to the Geely group. They absolutely are in a position to scale up the production side. And from a demand perspective, the Eletre will be a strong contender in the Chinese market where Porsche sells 80k vehicles per year - many in the same segment as the Eletre.
https://www.lotusengineering.com/leva/
Potentially followed by a 2+2 based on the same platform.
Building Assets and developing new cars costs money but has long term benefit
Nah.
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