(Reuters) – Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), owned by India’s Tata Motors, said on Monday it will resume some of its manufacturing operations in the coming days, as the luxury carmaker begins a phased recovery following a cyber attack earlier this month.
On Saturday, the British government pledged a $2 billion loan guarantee for the group to help support its supply chain in the wake of the production shutdown after the attack.
JLR has also secured a new 2 billion pound ($2.69 billion) funding facility from commercial banks separate from the government’s loan guarantee, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the discussions.
Rating agency Moody’s on Monday affirmed the automaker’s Ba1 corporate family rating, but revised its outlook to negative from positive.
The Ba1 rating reflects that it will likely withstand the impact of the cyber incident, said Sweta Patodia, an assistant vice president and analyst at Moody’s.
“The outlook change to negative from positive reflects our view that a full recovery in credit metrics will likely take several months,” she said.
JLR has already struggled this year, reporting a near 11% quarterly sales drop in July, due, in part, to a temporary pause in shipments to the United States after the Donald Trump administration imposed tariffs on all car imports.
The company has three factories in Britain that manufacture about 1,000 cars per day. According to the BBC, it is losing at least 50 million pounds ($68 million) a week after the shutdown of its factories, with many of its 33,000 staff told to stay at home.
Last week, JLR said it told suppliers that some systems were online, including the ones that control the supply of parts worldwide and the financial system that controls the wholesale of vehicles. It also said its capacity to process invoices had increased.
The breach was the latest in a string of cyber and ransomware attacks targeting companies around the world. In Britain, household names including Marks & Spencer and the Co-op Group have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated breaches.
($1 = 0.7447 pounds)
Reporting by Urvi Dugar and Unnamalai L; Editing by Sonia Cheema, Janane Venkatraman and Tomasz Janowski
Source: worldautoforum.com
