Tough times called for necessary measures.
As the world continues to deal with the pandemic, some automakers are managing to hang in there better than others. Fortunately, not a single major or minor carmaker has been forced out of business over the past year and a half or so. But it's been a rocky road for everyone, specifically McLaren. It suffered serious financial losses, assembly line shutdown, a delay in future product rollouts, and 1,000+ job cuts.
Perhaps the most substantial and troubling consequence was the $237 million sale of its Woking, UK headquarters to New York-based investment firm Global Net Lease. The latter is required to lease the property back to McLaren for the next two decades.
But late last week, the McLaren Group, which includes the road car division and McLaren Racing, announced, via Reuters, it is receiving a $758 million equity investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and a global investment firm called Ares Management. A significant portion of that capital will be in the form of preference shares and equity warrants while the rest is from existing shareholders and convertible preference shares.
This is obviously good news for the company that just brought us the all-new McLaren Artura hybrid sports car as the deal also enables the company to repay a previous loan from last year under favorable terms.
McLaren's largest majority shareholder remains Bahrain's Mumtalaket sovereign investment fund. "Following the strategic investment into Racing that we secured last year, this successful equity raise is a key element of our comprehensive financial strategy to support the Group's sustainable growth plans," said McLaren Group's executive chairman Paul Walsh. "With these strong foundations now in place, we are well positioned to achieve our ambitions as a global luxury supercar and elite motorsport business, with Automotive as McLaren's core profit driver."
Combined with another equity injection and investments from late year, McLaren continues to turn things around. In the first business quarter of this year, for example, revenues increased by 145 percent over the same period in 2020.
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