Tariffs cut Ineos Automotive revenue 24% and left a €913m loss
Sir Jim Ratcliffe's carmaker sells two-thirds of its vehicles into America and builds them in France. The arithmetic no longer works, and production may follow the customers.
Ineos Automotive reported revenues of €608m last year, down from €799m in 2024. That is a fall of 24 per cent.
The pre-tax loss for the year was €913m. Cumulative pre-tax losses across the company's first three years now stand at €1.73bn.
About 65 per cent of its vehicles are exported to the United States. Those exports initially attracted tariffs of as much as 50 per cent.
The Grenadier 4x4 now carries a 15 per cent tariff. The Quartermaster pick-up carries 25 per cent.
Lynn Calder, chief executive of Ineos Automotive, said moving Grenadier production from France to the US was "under great consideration". She argued the move followed the industrial principle of building where you sell, tariffs or no tariffs.
Deliveries fell to 9,600 vehicles in the year, indicating an average wholesale price of about €63,000. The company had previously hoped to build 25,000 vehicles a year.
The loss was not all tariffs. Ineos Automotive laid off about 500 people, close to a third of its staff, and wrote off its investment in the Fusilier hybrid.
That write-off totalled €338m, the single largest item in the accounts. The Fusilier has been shelved for now for lack of demand.
Stripping out €62m of restructuring costs, the loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation was €125m. Interest charges of €270m and further depreciation writedowns did the rest.
Calder said the company would drop its plan to build the Fusilier from scratch and use an established 4x4 hybrid platform instead.
The Grenadier is built at a former Mercedes-Benz plant in Hambach, in France near the German border. Ratcliffe picked the site after looking for a location in Britain.
Calder said that even if Grenadier production moved to the US, Hambach was unlikely to close, because it could become the plant for the Fusilier and the European market.
The company has been lobbying on this for over a year. In March 2025, when the US announced car tariffs, Calder called for "urgent and direct political intervention on tariffs" from EU politicians. It did not arrive in time.
Calder said sales this year were on schedule to recover by 15 per cent, helped by fleet orders from the Italian and Austrian militaries, eastern European security forces and the RNLI.
The lesson for smaller exporters is in the gap between the two numbers. A 15 per cent tariff on a €63,000 vehicle is roughly €9,500 a unit, and a company shipping two-thirds of its output into that tariff cannot price its way out. Ineos has the balance sheet to move a factory across an ocean. Most exporters do not, which makes the question of where you build a decision to take before the tariff schedule changes, not after.