Aston Martin has announced it will cut up to 20 percent of its global workforce. That is approximately 600 people, mostly based in the UK at the Gaydon factory in Warwickshire and the St Athan facility in Wales. The company reported a net loss of £493.2 million for 2025, a 52 percent widening from the year before. Annual revenue fell 21 percent to £1.258 billion. Wholesale volumes dropped 10 percent to 5,448 cars. The average selling price per vehicle fell 15 percent to £209,000.
In the same week those numbers landed, Aston Martin announced it had sold the naming rights to its Formula 1 team for £50 million to AMR GP Holdings, an entity controlled by executive chairman Lawrence Stroll, the man who bought Aston Martin out of near collapse in 2020 and has since injected close to £600 million of his own money keeping it alive. The racing team already held those naming rights until 2055. The new agreement extended them to perpetuity. As Daily Car Blog observed, Stroll was effectively selling Aston Martin something it already partly owned, "a transaction that, to skeptical analysts, resembles less a creation of value than an accounting incantation."
That is the state of Aston Martin in February 2026.
The History Nobody Mentions Often Enough
Aston Martin has gone bankrupt eight times. In 1924, 1925, 1932, 1947, 1974, 1981, 2007 and most recently 2020. The brand has survived every one of those collapses, usually because someone with deep pockets and a romantic attachment to the marque arrived just in time.
Lawrence Stroll rescued Aston Martin in January 2020 with a £500 million bailout. His consortium paid £182 million for a 16.7 percent stake, with an additional £318 million raised through new share issuance. Stroll became executive chairman and brought with him F1 connections, luxury brand experience from early investments in Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, and Michael Kors, and a stated belief that Aston Martin was a fundamentally undervalued asset being mismanaged rather than a fundamentally broken business.
Five years on, the turnaround has not arrived. In that period the company has issued multiple profit warnings, returned to shareholders for capital repeatedly, cycled through chief executives, and required Stroll to make further personal injections including a $162 million funding boost in early 2025. Since 2020, he has now committed close to £600 million of his own money to the cause. The share price has declined from the rescue valuation. Debt has grown. Losses have continued.
That pattern is not new for Aston Martin. What is new is the combination of factors making the 2025 results uniquely punishing.
The Tariff Problem
The United States is Aston Martin's largest single market. The company builds everything in the UK and exports. It has no American factory and no realistic prospect of building one. When Donald Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles in 2025, Aston Martin halted US shipments entirely in April and May while it assessed the damage and waited to see whether a UK trade deal would emerge.
It did. The UK secured a reduction to 10 percent on a cap of 100,000 vehicles annually, allowing Aston Martin to resume American sales from June. But the pause cost months of revenue in its most important territory, and the remaining 10 percent tariff continues to compress margins on every car sold there.
CEO Adrian Hallmark was direct in public comments. "I don't want to blame Donald Trump for all of our woes, but he was certainly a big part of the problem that we faced last year." He added that the company had set out to reach breakeven in 2025 and "missed it by quite a margin."
Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover, another British automaker, do not have factories in the United States and export all vehicles sold there. Both halted US shipments last year while assessing the tariffs' impact. The exposure is structurally identical. Neither brand can absorb an American tariff the way a company with US production capacity can. The tariff is a direct cost on every unit sold, passed partly to customers through higher prices and partly absorbed as margin compression. At the volumes Aston Martin sells, 5,448 cars globally in a full year, the arithmetic is brutal.
As MotorBuzz documented in its deep dive into how tariffs actually work, the burden of these levies falls on manufacturers and buyers in equal measure. For a brand selling £200,000 plus cars into a market that has just made them meaningfully more expensive, the demand destruction is immediate.
The China Problem
The second headwind is China, the world's largest automotive market and a territory Aston Martin had been building toward as a growth engine. Group CEO Adrian Hallmark described the global luxury automotive market in 2025 as having "faced one of its most turbulent years in recent times," with "consumer demand impacted by escalating geopolitical uncertainties and macroeconomic challenges."
China's domestic economic slowdown, compounded by its own trade tensions with the West and the rapid emergence of local luxury and performance brands, has made the market significantly harder for British and European manufacturers. Jaguar Land Rover, Bentley, and Porsche all reported declining Chinese volumes in 2025. For Aston Martin, which sells far lower volumes and cannot spread the pain across a wider product range, the softness in China removed a market it was counting on to grow while the US was under tariff pressure.
The two problems arrived simultaneously. That is a genuinely difficult position for any company with £1.38 billion of net debt and negative free cash flow.
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The F1 Team Deal: Creative Finance or Red Flag?
The naming rights transaction deserves more scrutiny than it has received in most coverage. Aston Martin sold the right to use its own name on its Formula 1 team, in perpetuity, for £50 million. The buyer is AMR GP Holdings, which is controlled by Lawrence Stroll, who is also the executive chairman of Aston Martin Lagonda. The team already had those rights until 2055 under an existing arrangement.
The new agreement merely stretches that claim into perpetuity, a transaction that, to skeptical analysts, resembles less a creation of value than an accounting incantation.
Bloomberg reported that Stroll's fundraising efforts show "increasing desperation at the debt laden automaker, with some observers suggesting the company could prosper, like peers Rolls Royce and Bentley, under a larger owner." That last clause is the one that matters. Rolls Royce belongs to BMW. Bentley belongs to Volkswagen. Both brands flourish inside vast industrial groups that absorb research and development costs, share platforms, and provide patient capital. Neither would exist in their current form as independent listed companies.
Aston Martin has been an independent listed company since its 2018 IPO. The share price at IPO was £19. In early 2026 it trades at a fraction of that. CFO Doug Lafferty has stated that raising additional equity "is not the plan" this year, pointing to the F1 naming rights proceeds and operating improvements as the path forward. The company ended 2025 with £250 million cash and £1.38 billion net debt. Generating positive free cash flow remains the target. Lafferty says it is not expected until the cashflow trajectory improves through 2026.
The Valhalla, Aston Martin's hybrid supercar priced at considerably more than the standard lineup, is expected to improve the average selling price per unit as deliveries ramp. That is the concrete operational lever available. Whether it is enough lever for the load it needs to shift is the question every analyst watching this company is sitting with.
What Comes Next
The job cuts form part of a broader effort to stabilise the company's finances after years of volatility. Alongside the workforce reduction, Aston Martin has trimmed its five year capital expenditure plan to £1.7 billion from £2 billion by delaying investment in electric vehicle development.
That EV delay is worth noting. Aston Martin was committed to electrification on a specific timeline. That timeline has now slipped in order to preserve cash. The Valhalla hybrid buys time. Full electric products move further into the future. Whether that matters commercially depends entirely on how quickly the ultra luxury customer base actually wants EVs, a question the industry is still receiving mixed signals on.
The workforce reduction delivers annualised savings of £40 million once complete. Against a net loss of £493 million, that is a contribution rather than a solution. The structural challenge is that Aston Martin sells approximately 5,400 cars a year at prices that, while high in absolute terms, are not high enough given the cost base, the debt service obligations, and the development investment required to keep products competitive.
Ferrari sells more than 13,000 cars a year, generates operating margins above 20 percent, carries minimal net debt, and has a market capitalisation roughly 25 times larger. Ferrari is not an appropriate comparison for Aston Martin's finances. It is, however, the benchmark every potential Aston Martin customer has in their head when they are deciding where to place £200,000.
The Larger Question
Aston Martin has gone bankrupt seven times in its 112 year existence, buffeted repeatedly by waxing and waning demand for its cars. That volatility underscores the struggle for automakers to persist as businesses, even ones that James Bond made famous.
Automotive News noted that observers are increasingly suggesting the company could prosper under a larger owner. That is the conversation happening in quiet rooms in Gaydon and in analyst notes that are only slightly more diplomatic than this article. Aston Martin as a brand has extraordinary heritage, genuine desirability, and a product quality level that has improved substantially under Stroll's ownership. The cars are genuinely excellent. The Vantage, the DB12, the DBX707, and the Valhalla are as good as anything the brand has ever produced.
The business case for independence, however, grows harder to make with each set of annual results. Eight bankruptcies and a turnaround that has cost the rescuer personally more than most companies are worth suggests that Aston Martin's problem is not management, not product, and not brand equity. It is scale. The brand cannot generate enough volume at its price point to cover the costs of being a standalone manufacturer competing in the same technology race as companies with ten or twenty times the revenue.
Lawrence Stroll has put in the money, the management, the F1 platform, and the personal commitment. The market has handed him tariffs, a Chinese slowdown, and a luxury consumer who is somewhat less insulated from economic uncertainty than the previous cycle suggested.
Whether a ninth rescue arrives, or whether this time the solution is a sale to a larger group willing to pay for the name and protect the workforce, is the question Aston Martin enters 2026 unable to answer. What is certain is that 600 people in Warwickshire and Wales are paying the price of a problem that started well before Donald Trump discovered tariffs.