Is Tobias Moers right to lead Aston?

[samoht]

This morning Aston issued a profits warning, saying that they were about £15m below their 2021 earnings targets due to the ongoing saga of getting the Valkyrie into production.

Off the back of this, Autocar is now speculating that Tobias Moers might follow Otmar Szafnauer in departing from Laurence Stroll's employment https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/business-financ... , claiming that Aston have approached a potential replacement CEO.

For what it's worth, Laurence Stroll has told the Financial Times the report was “categorically not true”, saying he was “absolutely not engaged whatsoever in looking to replace Tobias”.
https://www.ft.com/content/10960aad-585d-448e-976a...

In addition to the Valkyrie project's continued development troubles, the DBX perhaps hasn't been the smash-hit hoped for, and the current generation of sports/GT cars aren't selling as well as they were - more analysis of Aston's troubles from the informative SSO here https://karenable.com/analysis-of-aston-martins-q3...

Beyond the business issues, the departure of "more than half" of the company’s senior leadership also suggests a not entirely happy ship; while some departures can be justified as positive given that the current crew got the company into the current mess, people like Matt Becker are highly regarded, and their departure for rival McLaren is hard to see as anything but a loss.

So one can sort of see why Moers' position could be questioned.


At the same time, I'm pretty surprised, in my mind he's only just got there, arriving less than 18 months ago. Given that it takes three to four years to bring a new car to market, and that all of those 18 months have seen all world markets heavily affected by an unprecedented pandemic, it seems rather sudden to consider changing the leadership in such a short timeframe.

In fact given the long lead times of automotive, it feels fairer to evaluate Moers by the achievements of AMG, which are considerable both commercially and in terms of pleasing enthusiasts. The fact he left shortly after strenuously objecting to robbing the C63 of its signature V8 engine is also in my eyes a positive.

The immediate profit warning stems mainly from the Valkyrie project, which is highly ambitious and was in trouble before Moers joined. Aston have however announced that ten cars have now been delivered, which suggests the worst may be behind them. They've also apparently scraped past their sales targets of 6k cars total, 3k of which being DBXs.

The "F1 Edition" Vantage has been widely praised as the car the Vantage ought to have been from launch, with the revised and more progressive torque delivery singled out for praise; just because you can hit maximum torque with a bang just off idle with a big turbo engine doesn't mean you should, especially in a 2WD car.


I'm personally against chopping and changing staff when the fertiliser hits the fan, I generally favour loyalty - choose people carefully, support them and stick with 'em through thick and thin. I think the product developments to date under Moers' watch look broadly positive. More widely, a strategic alliance like the one they have with Mercedes feels like the best guarantee of Aston's future, and I can't but think that Moers' links represent a key way for Aston to communicate with Mercedes and get the best out of the relationship.


So overall I reckon that Tobias Moers and the Mercedes partnership is probably the best available future for Aston Martin, and in any case it's the one that Stroll has chosen as the owner, and it thus behoves him to stick with it and make it work. But it's interesting to hear what insights anyone else has, and any likely alternative paths.

[Scrump]

Existing threads here:
https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...
And here:
https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...