Aston Martin warns 2025 profits undershoot as US tariffs bite

Aston Martin has warned that its 2025 profits will land below expectations as US tariffs and weaker mix from high-margin special models squeeze a business that already runs on thin credibility and expensive capital.

According to the Evening Standard, Aston Martin told shareholders that gross margins and adjusted EBIT will be “slightly below” the low end of analyst forecasts, implying earnings under £184 million. Wholesale volumes fell to 5,448 cars in 2025 from 6,030 in 2024, a decline the company attributes to a “highly challenging trading environment,” including tariff pressure and reduced deliveries of its higher-margin Special models.

The US is Aston Martin’s largest market, and the company was hit by a 10% tariff last year—reduced from a previously planned 27.5%, the Standard reports. For a luxury brand that sells price, scarcity and symbolism, tariffs function as a blunt external cost shock: an implicit tax on global supply chains that arrives by politician, not by market signal. The firm can try to “price it in,” but luxury demand is not infinitely inelastic, and the cost of being wrong is magnified when your balance sheet is already doing the heavy lifting.

The response has been more financial engineering than manufacturing heroics. The Standard reports Aston Martin has cut investment plans and, on Friday, disclosed a deal to sell naming rights for its Aston Martin F1 team to a related party, AMR GP Holdings, for £50 million. In exchange, AMR will use the Aston Martin name in Formula One until 2055.

The company is monetising the brand’s future to patch the present. It may improve liquidity, as management claims, but it also underlines what tariffs and volatile policy regimes do to firms that depend on confidence: they push management toward balance-sheet manoeuvres and asset sales rather than long-term product bets.

Trade policy is not a surgical tool. It doesn’t “target” foreign competitors so much as it taxes domestic consumers and forces companies to build political risk premia into pricing, inventory and capital allocation. For a manufacturer trying to execute a turnaround under executive chairman Lawrence Stroll, per the Standard, the tariff line item is one more sign that in the modern economy, the most unpredictable supplier is often the state.