Last year was Bentley’s second most profitable year yet.

Though, speak to boss Adrian Hallmark – who has just announced he will be taking over as boss of Aston Martin – and you get the sense that the pride comes not from what the final profit figure was, but from knowing how bad it could have been.

The previous six years on Hallmark’s watch have been fruitful in setting the company up for success even in challenging market conditions. Last year was indeed challenging for Bentley and all other luxury car makers. Hallmark said global demand for luxury cars was flat, and the only growth came from premium cars with luxury pricing - the likes of Range Rover and high-end Mercedes models.

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Yet Bentley was able to prosper, for three key reasons: a restructure in 2020, increased pricing structures on its cars, and an increase in the amount of bespoke content fitted to them.

Hallmark took over Bentley when it was loss-making and in his first full year in charge in 2019 (he joined the company in February 2018) made a €300 million swing in profitability to take Bentley back into the black. Last year’s profits were almost 10 times more than 2019’s €65m figure, at €589m, even though volumes were only up just over 2500 cars to 13,560 units.

The first underlying trend in its success is the long-term impact of a successful restructure of the business in 2020 as part of Bentley’s ‘Beyond 100’ plan to prepare the business for going all-electric and paying its own way to do so, something that would require huge investments in technology and facilities. 

Linked into this was the need to make each unit sold more profitable, to allow the firm to not be so reliant on simply increasing sales as a way of growing profits and revenues.

“It's a great indication of the business model that we've created over the last four years after restructuring,” Hallmark said in a briefing call announcing Bentley’s latest financial results. “We’re just a few thousand more cars than we used to sell in the 2000s, but we’re now making three to four times the profit per year that we used to make.”

Hallmark is simply selling every car Bentley makes for more money, something not achieved by upping list prices but by increasing the amount of bespoke Mulliner content - on top of the factory-fit options that are offered on standard price lists.