We wind back 40 years and revisit Jaguar’s first steps towards independence from British Leyland
THE MEDIA loves an anniversary and in the car magazine business we’re no different, which explains the reams of copy devoted to Jaguar’s XK sports cars which first arrived on the scene 75 years ago. This month however also marks another anniversary for the Jaguar brand, which in many ways is just as significant: 40 years ago, a company called Jaguar Cars Ltd published its first set of accounts.
Nothing odd in that you might think, although surely this wouldn’t have been the first posted accounts for a company which started in the car business 100 years ago. Well, yes... and no.
Jaguar Cars Ltd had been incorporated just the previous year and that set of accounts posted in December 1983 was the first step on the road to the company leaving government ownership as it escaped the clutches of the British Leyland juggernaut lumbering towards eventual oblivion.
For the first time since 1966, the business of making Jaguars was commercially separated from the rest of the organisation and the Jaguar board, headed by Sir John Egan, was steaming ahead with their plans to privatise the company.
It hadn’t been an easy ride to get to this position though, since the position of BL and its chairman Michael Edwardes was that selling off the profitable bits – in reality only Jaguar and Land Rover – would weaken the remaining brands which were the volume sellers.
The Thatcher government, on the other hand, was keen to see BL raise some capital for itself as a condition of further investment.
As Egan relates in his autobiography Saving Jaguar, in 1983 he discovered out of the blue that General Motors was interested in acquiring Jaguar, but having spent time at GM previously he wasn’t a fan of the American giant’s short-term approach.
After a meeting with the GM top brass, Egan relates that he came to a crucial realisation that as long as Jaguar remained part of BL, government pressure meant it was at risk of being sold off to an unsuitable bidder. The alternative was to privatise the company via an initial public offering.
The flotation was set for the following year and in a similar vein to the British Telecom sale which would happen later, the government retained a ‘Golden Share’, this being a holding with special voting rights which meant the consent of the holder was required for a change of company ownership. The Golden Share was valid for five years, something which it appears was quietly noted in Detroit.
Initially the biggest potential stumbling block was not a financial one but an engineering issue. The much-delayed XJ40 had been due to launch in 1984, but management
