Vertu Motors battled the ongoing “upheaval” in the new car market in the first half with a 9.5% decline in adjusted pre-tax profits to £20m on turnover, up 1.43% to £2.5bn.
The group took the opportunity once again to take a swipe at government ZEV Mandate, which is skewing the new car and van markets, pushing sales of cars consumers don’t want.
As a result pre-registrations activity, an indication of a forced market, appeared elevated.
The H1 record revenues were bolstered by the acquisition of the Burrows group in October 2024.
Vertu grew total market share in new retail, fleet and commercial vehicle sectors to 4.5% compared to 4.4% last time.
Group like-for-like retail sales volumes of battery electric vehicles grew 82.4% compared to UK BEV retail sales growth of 55.2%, representing major market share gains in the growing BEV segment.
Vertu warned of a profit hit from supply restrictions caused by the JKR cyber-attack but said it did have insurance coverage for third party cyber outages and it was in talks with its insurers.
Robert Forrester, CEO, said: “The group has performed well despite continued upheaval in the new car market due to the Government’s policy to electrify the UK car parc.
“We have delivered market share gains in every area as the Group trades under the single Vertu brand for the first time. We were particularly pleased to see further growth in our BEV retail market share.
Our high-margin aftersales and used car channels delivered another good performance.
It was disappointing for the industry to face major disruption across the JLR network following a cyber-attack on the manufacturer during the key plate-change month of September. I was in awe of the way that our teams reacted to the disruption on customers and to minimise the impact in our 10 JLR dealerships, with the full support of JLR which has responded admirably.
Whilst the situation is fluid, it appears to be easing in recent days. We are currently working with our insurance brokers and insurers to assess a potential claim under our insurance policy, which extends to the impact of third-party systems outages.
