Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has reported year-on-year increased sales volumes for the second quarter (Q2) of the financial year 2024, the three-month period to September 30 2023.
The company said the growth reflected “continuing improvement in supply, allowing JLR to deliver more vehicles to clients”.
The carmaker said its wholesale volumes in the period, excluding the Chery Jaguar Land Rover China joint venture (JV), increased by almost a third (29%) to 96,817 units in comparison to the same quarter last year. JLR also increased its wholesale volumes by 4% compared to Q1 of the financial year, which ended June 30.
Retail sales, which include the Chery JV, were up a fifth (21%) since Q2 last year to 106,561 units. Retail volumes were higher in all regions year-on-year, particularly in North America, where volumes were up 32%, and Europe where they increased 16%.
The OEM has recently been implementing different software to improve its supply chain visibility and strengthen supply. In June, JLR announced it had partnered with predictive insights firm Everstream Analytics to embed artificial intelligence into its supply chain. The software is used to strengthen the supply chain by monitoring in real-time for potential risks such as natural disasters, strikes, data breaches and export issues that could delay or halt shipments. In conjunction with this, the carmaker also partnered with Tata Technologies to help it implement the latest SAP S/4 Hana cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. At the time, JLR said this would bring data from multiple departments into one single source to stabilise operations and improve supply chain visibility for both the carmaker and its suppliers. In August, the carmaker promoted Paulina Chmielarz and Frank Ludwig to push its digitalisation and improve performance in its supply chain operations.
Barbara Bergmeier, executive director of industrial operations, JLR spoke to Automotive Logistics earlier in the year about JLR’s end-to-end supply chain upgrade, and how the OEM is improving its plants, systems, skills and supplier relations.
In its Q2 results, the automaker’s order book remained strong, which it said reflected strong demand for its products, but JLR has managed to reduce its backlog from 185,000 at the end of Q1 to 168,000 by the end of Q2.
JLR is due to report its full financial results for Q2 2024 next month. Based on preliminary cash balances, it said it expects positive free cashflow of around £300m ($365.4m) in the quarter.
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