ByProfessor David Bailey
8th September 2025

JLR screeches to a halt

‘Severely disrupted’ is the official JLR press-office line. ‘Catastrophic’ is another term used by one JLR insider to describe the impact of the cyberattack which has shut down all production at JLR across its global operations. Plants in the UK, Slovakia, Brazil, India and China are all silent. 

It comes at a bad time of course given Trump’s tariffs and concerns over the slow speed of EV take up which has just seen JLR postpone the launch of new EV models.
Profits will undoubtedly take a hit, but by how much?  

Well, the firm makes around 1000 cars day globally. In recent years the firm has shifted up market and the average selling price of a JLR car is now thought to be around £72,000. That equates to a daily revenue of some £72m. The firm’s last financial report forecast margins of 5-7% this year, so the hit to profit could run to £5m a day.

There is speculation that this will take weeks rather than days to fix. Indeed, restarting production is a complex business. If output is suspended for much of September then that could be a £150m profit hit for the firm.

If the firm can get things restarted quickly then it could claw back some of that lost profit by working flat out to meet a backlog of orders. But the longer the shutdown goes on the bigger the hit to profit, and the more likely it is that customers simply decide to go elsewhere.

More broadly, with JLR systems down, spare parts can’t be ordered, cars can’t be serviced, and new car sales can’t be registered, including on the September new plate day.

JLR has earlier said that there was ‘no evidence that any customer data has been stolen.’ Yet it has referred itself to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). That regulator must be alerted of any hacks which involve the leaking of personal data.

The firm’s brand image will also take a battering the longer this goes on.

Then there is the supply chain, centred very much here in the West Midlands, with JLR as the anchor firm.

The longer the shutdown goes on the bigger the impact on the supply chain.  At some point the government may need to provide a financial lifeline to keep the supply chain going.

This has happened before – think of after the 2005 MG Rover closure, and also after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami which saw the flow of key components form Japan shut down production at the likes of Honda in the UK.

That support came via the Regional Development Agency Advantage West Midlands as it tried to pick up the pieces after the collapse of MG Rover, and later the Manufacturing Advisory Service in the case of the Japanese earthquake. Both have since been scrapped by previous Coalition and Tory governments, underscoring the lack of any place-based industrial policy capacity in England. That really needs to change under Labour’s new industrial policy.

The Department for Business and Trade has a new Secretary of State in the form of Peter Kyle.  It needs to be doing more than just monitoring the situation. Rather it needs to start thinking fast about whether and how emergency support could be provided to the supply chain.

At the time of writing there is no indication of how long JLR will need to get up and running again. The bottom line, though, is that JLR needs to sort this out, and quickly.

Professor David Bailey is Professor of Business Economics at the Birmingham Business School.