Geely Buys Stake in Aston Martin
Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (aka Geely), China’s biggest privately owned car manufacturing group, has announced the purchase of 7.6% of Aston Martin Lagonda Holdings, the British high-end sportscar manufacturer.
This is the latest move by Li Shufu, founder and Chairman of Geely, to gradually expand his global automotive manufacturing empire. The Chinese billionaire already has a pretty impressive portfolio that already includes Volvo and Lotus and Polestar and significant shareholding in Proton (about 49%) and Mercedes Benz (9.7%).
In a press release earlier this week, Geely CEO Donghui li said, “We are delighted to announce our investment in Aston Martin and believe that with our well established track record and technology offerings, Geely can contribute to Aston Martin’s future success”.
The transaction value was not announced but using last week’s Aston Martin share price, the estimated value of the stake is somewhere in the region of GBP7.55 billion, which is of course quite a chunk of change.
Lawrence Stroll, father of Lance Stroll, the F1 driver, remains the largest shareholder and is said to be in the process of selecting the partner for its first all-electric model scheduled for launch sometime in 2025. Geely is of course heavily invested in EV technology so no guessing who Aston Martin may choose to partner with.
Aston Martin managed to sell some 6,200 cars in 2021 and their biggest market was China. However, the century-old manufacturer managed to lose some GBP93 million in the process and had to raise some GBP654 million in capital in part to lower debt levels and have money left over to invest in new product development.