UAE and wider Mena region happy hunting ground for UK car industry

The British car industry is benefiting from increasing demand here and in Saudi Arabia and the wider Mena region.

The car industry is the United Kingdom’s largest exporter by value and generated £27 billion (Dh159.71bn) of export revenue for the UK in 2011.

Typically the industry exports to more than 100 markets worldwide and accounts for about 11 per cent of total UK exports.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are two markets that import substantial numbers of cars from the UK, particularly in the niche high-quality end of the market that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) operates in.

The company, now owned by Tata of India, launched its latest models – the new Range Rover Sport, made in Solihull near Birmingham in the English midlands, and the Range Rover Evoque – in the UAE, Qatar and Lebanon this summer and the cars are only now becoming available.

Demand for the cars in the region is set to be high, following an extremely successful home launch. Waiting lists for the 2014 Range Rover Sport are now at least six months and key suppliers have been put on 24-hour working programmes.

Next week, Jaguar Land Rover will attempt to set the fastest recorded time for a land vehicle crossing Rub Al Khali, or the Empty Quarter, in Oman and the UAE – one of the harshest and most challenging desert environments on the planet, using a new, standard-production Range Rover Sport.

The start line is in Wadi Adda Wasir, Saudi Arabia and the route will run from there towards the finish line on the UAE border of the, a distance of more than 1,000km.

The car they are using will be production-spec, making this a particularly tough challenge in a terrain where usually only specialist sand vehicles are found.

Moi Torrallardona, 47, a Spanish off-road racer, will drive and put his extensive experience of the Dakar Rally, in which he competed for 10 successive years, to the test.

JLR’s commitment to the GCC region is full. It spends considerable sums and time developing its products so they are as suitable for the high temperatures and extreme desert conditions of the UAE as they are for coping with wind-lashed, damp and overcrowded British roads.

It has been rewarded with a 40 per cent growth in this year’s second-quarter Land Rover sales across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.

“We have had an exceptionally strong year to date in MENA, and these figures prove we have been successful in maintaining this momentum across both brands,” says Robin Colgan, the managing director for Jaguar Land Rover Mena.

“This was driven in part by the launch of three stunning new vehicles, which have been extremely well received by customers in the region – the all-new Range Rover, all-new Range Rover Sport and of course the Jaguar F-Type – complementing what is now our strongest ever line-up.”

The car maker is also considering building cars in Saudi Arabia, it has said. So far plans for a factory are limited to a letter of intent and a feasibility study but industry experts say construction of the world’s largest aluminium smelting factory in the country has attracted Jaguar Land Rover’s parent company, Tata, to consider a plant in the kingdom.

Meanwhile, JLR’s turnaround has been stunning to industry watchers.

The company is understood to have created 35,000 UK jobs since its Indian owners took it over in 2008. When Tata bought the business from Ford for US$2.3bn, few western analysts gave the company a chance of succeeding where a huge American car company had been unable to.

Yet by last year, Jaguar Land Rover sold a total of 357,773 vehicles, an increase of 30 per cent on 2011, and made a profit of £1.67bn (Dh9.87bn) on revenues of £15.8bn.

Now the firm plans to invest £2.75bn in its product creation and facilities in the financial year to March.

The British government has hailed JLR as a manufacturing success story and those who thought Tata had bitten off more than it could chew have been forced to eat their words.

But the next stage is to win over more customers in emerging markets, particularly in China, and to do so without jeopardising the new-found strength of its British operations.