There are certain products that are simply ‘cool’. They look nice, they are ‘touchy feely’ nice and whilst we all know the iPhone fits in to that category, a couple of great historic English brands of car are demonstrating that its not just the preserve of companies in the Silicon Valley or Cupertino.
OK, the cool Britannia bit might not be strictly true as both Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by the Indian company Tata Motors, but they are still built in the UK (for the moment maybe) and indeed it’s a shame that our captains of industry were not able to make Jaguar / Land Rover work in the way its present foreign owners clearly seem to be able to.
Cutting to the chase, September 2011 saw Jaguar/Land Rover sales up worldwide by 26% and the expanding Chinese market saw its sales of Jaguar up by 157% on the month with Land Rover up by 85%. OK, these are great figures, but this is still an expanding market place and in fact, the Jaguar part of the deal is up by 60% for the year to September and makes China Jaguars third biggest market place.
We all know it’s been a tough year here in the UK, but never the less; the UK is still Jaguars biggest market place and even here the two brands have shown a 12% increase in sales between them with the new Land Rover Evoque pulling in sales and Range Rover sales up in the month by 97% year on year.
It’s a similar picture across the other world markets and in September, sales of Jaguar products in India jumped by 63% with Land Rover rising by 157%. Brazil saw Land Rover sales up by 55% in September and in Russia they gobbled up 16% more Land Rovers and 24% more Jaguars. Closer to home in Europe, the two brands pulled a 38% increase between them.
I could go on, looking at many more individual countries, pretty much all that show huge increases in sales and whilst both Jaguar and Land Rover make super desirable products, I would like to think the sales are recognition of the consistent high quality products that British workers deliver and that maybe the UK is still a cool place to buy your cars from.
