Cyberattack impact on Tata Motors PV earnings crosses Rs 3,200 crore; losses still mounting

Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Ltd’s British subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover is still reeling under losses, months after a cyberattack crippled production at its manufacturing plants in the United Kingdom and Slovakia. The company reported a second straight quarter of heavy losses in the third quarter as costs related to the September cyberattack soared to 260 million pounds. To be clear, this does not factor in losses on account of production shutdown.

“We have cumulatively taken 260 million pounds of exceptional charges in Q2 and Q3. That number, however, doesn’t include the lost sales volumes on the 50,000 units that we lost in production,” Richard Molyneux, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of JLR, said during a post-earnings conference call. The bottom line number will be considerably more than 260 million pounds, Molyneux added.

The cyberattack cost Tata Motors’ JLR about 50,000 units in terms of production loss. “About 20,000 impacted the Q2 results and 30,000 impacted our Q3 results,” Molyneux said.

After the JLR cyberattack, Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC), a UK-based nonprofit, pegged the financial losses from the cyberattack at 1.9 billion pounds. CMC called the JLR cyberattack the most economically damaging cyber event to hit Britain, with the vast majority of the financial impact being due to the loss of manufacturing output at the automaker and its suppliers. The company did not have any cybersecurity insurance when the attack happened in September 2025.

Challenges mount

It is not just the JLR cyberattack that has caused worries for Tata Motors. One of JLR’s biggest markets, China, is facing demand headwinds while the US is seeing higher tariffs. Tariffs on JLR cars exported to the US from the UK have gone up to 10% from 2.5% earlier while the Defender SUVs, exported from Slovakia, attract 15% tariffs in the US.

“China is definitely the most challenging market at the moment,” Molyneux said. “In China, there is definitely a squeeze on the luxury segment from local new energy vehicles and also from a general move away from luxury by the Chinese authorities, which is evident increasingly by their luxury car tax threshold in July where they basically levied an extra 10% duty on all cars with a transaction price between 900,000 RMB and 1.3 million RMB,” said Molyneux. “Demand globally is not particularly strong. The US, with continued uncertainty, is not as buoyant as it was before,” he added.

JLR’s net debt has ballooned from zero at the end of FY25 to 3.3 billion pounds at the end of Q3 FY26. JLR’s net debt stood at 1.8 billion pounds in Q2 FY26. “Our debt has increased. We will certainly not get back to net cash over the next two or three quarters. That is going to be something that is going to take a little bit more time,” the JLR CFO said. As a result, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles’ net auto debt increased to ₹39,400 crore as on December 31, 2025.

Break-even volume threshold has also gone up “significantly”. “Its fair to say that this year our cash break-even is significantly above 325,000 units,” Molyneux said. It had taken the luxury carmaker several years to halve its break-even volume threshold to around 325,000 units from 600,000 units in FY19. Following the cyberattack, JLR had revised its EBIT margin guidance for FY26 in the range of 0% to 2% from 5% to 7% earlier.

For JLR parent Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, the last couple of quarters have been challenging due to tariff uncertainty and cyberattack. Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles posted a consolidated net loss of ₹3,486 crore for Q3 FY26. “Our overall performance has been impacted by the carryover incident at JLR. Q3 margin was -2.7%. Loss before tax was at Rs 3,200 crore, reflecting the loss in production volume of JLR. The loss before tax excludes certain exceptional provisions of Rs 800 crore at JLR towards the cyber incident,” said Dhiman Gupta, Chief Financial Officer, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles.