Aston Martin is for sale, but why?
Ford is in deep financial straits right now with Alan Mullaly and friends betting the house and the furniture that they'll make the right moves to steer the company clear of financial disaster with great products and prudent decision-making.
In their fight to survive the company has sold off Hertz for $5BLN and are looking to dump Aston Martin. Right now some Australian Billionaire has bid somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.46BLN for the famed British Marquee... that never makes a consistant profit. Why the high cost? Ego? Maybe. But more likely people with billions to spend throw their money where they can make more... that's why the rich always seem to get richer.
The truth is that the luxury market is like a rocket into space with no known destination... it just keeps going up. Can the world handle 10,000 Astons? 15,000? Hell, the population doubles about every 20 years and there seems to be no shortage of new multi-millionaires. Why sell? Is it the 1.46BLN? To Ford and their giant woes 1.46 off the mountain of debt is like a 500 lb man taking off his shoes before weighing in.
Ford is getting rid of the Freestar because there is no growth and that's a great idea. They killed the Taurus and Lincoln LS and got nothing for it, even though they put more money into those products than they ever dreamed of putting into Aston... so at 1.46BLN profit it's the deal of the century.
IF by some chance instead of giving up on Aston and spending that 1.46 on more buyouts or another bailout of Visteon or Jaguar Ford was able to get, say, the same 10% ROI that Nissan is poised to get to in the next couple years, just imagine. With a factory with the capacity to build 8,000 vehicles per year and an average transaction price of 150k, that's about 120M per year profit. Those are concervative numbers too. Porshe gets more like 20-30% ROI on their products... that would look really nice on the bottom line.