Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) last week posted global retail sales growth for May of +18 per cent year on year, driven by strong results across key regions.
Models such as the Discovery Sport, XE and the F-Pace are all performing above expectations. It was the best May ever for the firm.
Across different markets, JLR sales were up 28 per cent year on year in China, 23 per cent in the 海角视频 and 24 per cent in Europe (so much for Brexiters' claims of Europe being a 'dead duck' - auto sales are growing strongly there). The US lagged with growth of "only" eight per cent.
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The performance in China was especially interesting, with sales up to 9,300 units, with Land Rover up 29 per cent and Jaguar up 22 per cent. This is an impressive performance given the maturing automotive market in China and recent slow down there.
The ramping up of Discovery Sport production in China (the second model to be produced there after the Evoque) and the launch of the long-wheel base Jaguar XFL will boost JLR sales in China further.
The XFL caters for local tastes where business men and women with chauffeurs want more space to do office work in the car as they are driven around (and get stuck in monster Chinese traffic jams).
Globally, Jaguar retail sales were up 90 per cent to over 10,600 units driven by the XE small executive saloon that sold 3,100 units in May and the launch of the F-Pace crossover that sold a remarkable 3,000 units globally. The F-Pace is simply flying out of showrooms and is the 'must-have' premium crossover of the year.
When the F-Pace was launched, Jaguar design supremo Ian Callum said that boosting familiarity with the Jaguar brand was key in broadening the brand's growth: many people outside key European, North American and Asian markets simply aren't aware of the famous brand.
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For this reason, the F-Pace shares a front-end family look with other Jaguar cars and takes many styling cues from the F-Type sports car.
People need to recognise Jaguars on the road first, Callum has said, if they’re to become familiar with the brand and, eventually, go out and buy one.
Overall, the XE and F-pace models accounted for close to a third of Jaguar's global sales for the month and is a very positive reflection on how good these new models are. Indeed, the waiting list for the F-Pace is over six months in some markets.
Other Jaguar models such as the XF, XJ and F-Type continued to see a sales decline of between nine per cent and 16 per cent. Overall, the strong growth in the new F-Pace and the XE models is likely to outweigh the underperforming models like the XJ and is thus likely to deliver continue growth for the Jaguar brand.
It also raises a question of where Jaguar should be going. The SUV/crossover market is set to expand rapidly in coming years around the world. Even in China, while car sales rose slowly at the back end of 2015, SUV sales have jumped.
JLR has been far too slow to get Jaguar into the crossover market (nearly 40 per cent of Audi sales are expected to be crossovers in the near future) and the F-Pace needs to be the first of a range of Jaguar crossover models of different sizes. Next out of the block should be a smaller E-Pace.
The key point is that the crossover charge should be a priority for Jaguar, with any new platforms being able to be used for sporty crossovers as well as luxury saloons (think of any new XJ saloon, for example).
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Looking forward, JLR's new model cycle continues to look very promising. The new Discovery is expected to launch in the third quarter of JLR's next fiscal year and a new mid-size Range Rover model (rumoured to be called the 'Range Rover Velar' and based on the same underpinnings as the F-Pace) is expected in the quarter after that. Both should sell well, as should any new Jaguar E-Pace compact SUV (especially so given the ongoing shift towards smaller SUVs in cities).
So far this year, Jaguar has sold nearly 50,000 units, up 60 per cent on the same period in 2015, and this is only really a start for Jaguar which has for a long time underperformed in the JLR stable. It now has a raft of attractive models and more are needed.
Land Rover, of course, remains by far the dominant brand in the Jaguar Land Rover stable: 34,300 Land Rovers were sold in May, representing sales growth of six per cent. So far, though, this year, Land Rover volumes are up by 16 per cent, to 196,600 units, many being premium-priced SUVs bringing healthy margins to JLR.
JLR wants to release a raft of new or updated products over the next five years. The firm does not publicly discuss long-term sales goals but it’s thought to want to achieve at least one million in sales by 2020 - which would be about half the current annual volumes of BMW.
As I've noted before, what's important here is that the firm now has strengths across different markets and with its impressive product line up, can – probably for the first time in its history – cater to different tastes in different markets and can ride out shocks in different parts of the world.
There's no room for complacency, of course. Indeed, the Chinese slowdown last year in part stimulated the launch of an ambition cost reduction programme at the firm, called 'Leap 4.5'.
Overall, after a difficult period a year ago owing to the sharp slowdown in the Chinese premium auto market and the Tianjin Port explosion, Jaguar Land Rover is on a roll again.
* Professor David Bailey works at the Aston Business School