INDIA'S largest car maker Tata Motors reported a near 50 per cent dive in quarterly profits on Friday (August 7) due to a slump in sales of its luxury British unit in China.
Consolidated net profit for the three months to June fell to Rs27.69bn ($432.66m) from 53.98 billion rupees a year ago, a drop of 48.70 per cent, the Mumbai-based company said.
That was well below the expectations of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg who had predicted that the firm, part of Tata's sprawling tea-to-steel conglomerate, would report profits of Rs31.4bn.
It marked the company's second consecutive large fall in quarterly profits following a 56 per cent slump announced in May.
The latest fall was "primarily driven by weak China sales (of Jaguar Land Rover JLR)," Tata Motors president and chief financial officer C Ramakrishnan told reporters.
JLR shifted only half the number of luxury cars that it sold in the same period last year, Ramakrishnan said.
A sales increase in India helped stem the slide in profits, the company said in a statement.
Consolidated revenue slid 5.57 per cent to Rs610.20bn ($9.53bn) from Rs646.83bn, while revenue from JLR fell to £5bn ($7.76bn) from £5.35bn.
In India, the firm earned Rs8.05bn in the quarter to June, lower than last year due to a rise in costs to Rs1.17bn ($174.59m) from Rs945m a year ago.
Tata Motors is hugely reliant on revenues from JLR, which it bought for $2.3bn from Ford in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis.
