Aston Martin, the luxury car manufacturer, announced it had fired its chief executive Andy Palmer as part of a broader management revamp after the group suffered a crash in its stock price and a drop in revenue due to the ongoing global health crisis.
Tobias Moers will fill the post left by Palmer and join the company from Mercedes-AMG starting August 1. Moers is the highest ranking executive of the high-performance department of the German auto giant.
News about Aston Martin planning to give Palmer the pink slip was first made public over the weekend. Palmer disclosed to the media that he had no knowledge of the company's plans.
Palmer steered the company in its roll-out of some great new automobiles however the past few months were not as rosy as the group would have wanted it to be with a collapse into near-bankruptcy.
Aston Martin's manufacturing director Keith Stanton and executive chairman Lawrence Stroll have been appointed to lead the company's operations for the time being.
Aston Martin has already been besieged by falling sales prior to the coronavirus outbreak that dealt a heavy blow to the company whose share price tumbled 94 percent since its flotation in 2018.
In a statement, the board of directors have decided now is the time for new management to turn things around for the carmaker. Palmer disclosed serving Aston Martin for nearly six years has been a great honor.
Palmer has taken charge of the auto giant since 2014 but has been beset with difficulties since it went public in 2018. The group suffered a loss of $123 million the following year and was forced to secure a 500 million pound bailout deal in January.
In a related development, the company disclosed that three of its senior executives - Imelda Walsh, Tensie Whelan and Richard Solomons - had left the company on Saturday. The division heads had already indicated they would not run for re-election in June. Aston Martin's share price was up over 40 percent during pre-market trading Tuesday following the news.
For this first quarter of 2020, the company could only muster 50 percent of its expected revenues, as the pandemic began to rear its ugly head. Aston Martin sold 578 cars in the first three months, a far cry from the 1,057 in the same quarter in 2019.
Meanwhile, the management facelift comes after a tough few months at Aston Martin. The British car giant popularly known as the manufacturer of James Bond's out-of-this-world cars, was on the brink of sinking for the eighth time in the group's 107-year history.
