JLR may have suffered a £540 million hit due to the cyberattack

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover is likely to suffer a loss of £540 million ( ₹6,300 crore)—about a third of its 2024-25 profit—due to the September cyberattack, according to Cyber Monitoring Centre, an independent agency that tracks the impact of cyber hits on UK-based firms.

At the consolidated level, the incident could wipe out nearly a fourth of Tata Motors’ ₹28,149 crore profit for FY25.

The agency said the luxury carmaker, whose production was crippled for more than a month, will be able to fully resume production by January 2026 as it begins a phased restart of operations at its plants.

This is the first such estimate from an agency on the hack's impact on JLR, which accounted for more than 71% of Tata Motors' ₹4.4 trillion revenue in 2024-25. The UK-based carmaker had posted a profit of £1.8 billion in the last fiscal.

“During the period where production was halted, the reduction in UK manufacturing was close to 5,000 vehicles per week, with each week resulting in a modelled loss to JLR’s UK manufacturing operations of £108 million, comprising fixed costs and lost profit,” the agency said in its 22 October report. The production was affected for a period of five weeks.

JLR’s systems began coming online in late September, with all its plants now resuming operations in a phased manner.

The attack had disrupted production at the company's three manufacturing facilities—Solihull, Halewood, and Wolverhampton—in the UK, as well as the ones in Pune, India, and Nitra, Slovakia.

“An early January return is based on input from experts that JLR is likely to encounter some additional complexity in its return to full operations, either due to the ongoing challenges within the IT infrastructure or supply chain constraints,” the agency said in its report.

JLR declined to comment on the report's findings.

Other estimates

“Industry studies estimate that every hour of downtime in an automotive plant can cost between $1.5-2 million in lost output,” said Harshvardhan Sharma, group head for auto tech and innovation at Nomura Research Institute Consulting & Solutions India.

A Financial Times report in September estimated that the hit could cause a revenue loss of up to £2 billion as JLR did not have insurance against the cyberattack.

The financial impact of the cyberattack could be comparable to, or even exceed, the impact of the increase in tariffs in the US. “The tariff impact will be primarily on JLR. Tariff has gone up from 2.5% to 27.5%, and under the UK-US FTA, the tariff is 10%,” Tata group chairperson N. Chandrasekaran said during Tata Motors' annual general meeting on 20 June.

“The overall impact would have been £1.6 billion. But due to the steps taken by JLR, the impact has gone down to £600 million, which is visible in the margin guidance,” he said.

The shutdown

Starting from 31 August, the carmaker was unable to produce and dispatch cars to its dealers. The disruption came just five months after it had to halt exports to the US, its biggest market, for a month due to the uncertainty over tariffs, which prompted it to guide for a decline in full-year revenue and profitability.

The cyberattack had seen intervention from top leaders at the Tata group, with Chandrasekaran requesting weekly updates, Mint reported on 25 September. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), the conglomerate’s flagship information technology (IT) company, worked with the company to contain the hack.

Investors have expressed concerns about the impact of this series of developments on JLR and Tata Motors, with its shares being the worst-performing among the carmakers. This comes as the group has carved out a separate company for passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles.

Shares of Tata Motors declined 12% since the start of the calendar year, up to 14 October, the demerger record date. The Nifty Auto surged by around 16% in the same period.