Aston Martin to cut 20% of workforce in effort to save £40m

Details emerge after struggling carmaker reports pre-tax losses of £363.9m for 2025

The luxury carmaker Aston Martin Lagonda is to cut its workforce by 20% as it looks to save about £40m after reporting widening losses.

The group, which said earlier this month it was consulting on its latest redundancy programme, said it would reduce its workforce by up to a fifth, or about 500 employees, after action at the start of last year that cut 170 jobs.

In a statement, Aston Martin, which is majority-owned by the Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, said: “Having undertaken at the start of 2025 a process to make organisational adjustments to ensure the business was appropriately resourced for its future plans, we had to take the difficult decision at the end of 2025 to implement further changes.

“This latest programme will ultimately see the departure of up to 20% of our valued workforce.”

Details of the job cuts came as the carmaker reported widened pre-tax losses of £363.9m for 2025 against losses of £289.1m the previous year as trading came under pressure from US tariff increases and weak demand.

Investors had been braced for the losses after the carmaker last week issued its fifth profit warning since September 2024 and sold its permanent naming rights to its Formula One team.

Adrian Hallmark, Aston Martin’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that cutting jobs would not “solve our rightsizing needs” but was “an important part of the overall picture.

A process to reduce numbers was already under way, he said, which was “important to get us lean and effective for the future”.

The carmaker is headquartered in Gaydon, Warwickshire, and also has a manufacturing site in St Athan, south Wales.

The company’s shares have lost the vast majority of their value since a disastrous stock market float in 2019. Since then Aston Martin has faced repeated heavy losses, a dealer inventory crisis and persistent production challenges.

Donald Trump’s trade tariffs compounded those problems, making 2025 one of its “most turbulent years in recent times”, the company said, in which it was “forced to navigate an unpredictable policy landscape and supply chain challenges that ultimately impacted volumes, efficiency and margins”.

It added: “The year made one reality impossible to ignore: even the most resilient luxury brands are not insulated from geopolitical friction, and the headwinds created by these trade barriers have reshaped the competitive environment in ways that require us to adapt and take difficult decisions.”

Aston Martin also blamed “extremely subdued” demand in China, a key market for the carmaker, stemming from a weakening economy and changes to the country’s luxury car tariff rules that came in last summer.

Aarin Chiekrie, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “The poor performance is being blamed on external factors, such as US tariffs and macroeconomic uncertainty. But looking under the hood reveals some internal issues, making Aston Martin’s road to redemption more difficult.”

Chiekrie said asset sales and the staff cuts were “only part of the puzzle”, as these initiatives could only be taken so far.

He added: “Long-term success will rely on reversing the group’s declining sales volumes and benefiting from the improved efficiencies that a greater output would bring. Cutting the workforce so drastically makes a significant ramp-up in volumes hard to achieve, and the road ahead remains a difficult one to navigate for Aston Martin.”

Aston Martin shares fell 2% on Wednesday.