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British luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover ended 2025-26 with fewer employees than at the start of the year as it pursued cost-cutting measures to offset higher US tariffs and cyberattack-related expenses under new chief executive P.B. Balaji.
However, the first such workforce decline since the covid-19 pandemic more than doubled the Tata group carmaker’s separation bill to £58 million ( ₹742 crore).
JLR’s downsizing—by 3% to 42,850 employees—came amid staff reductions elsewhere in the group. IT major Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) saw its total workforce fall by 3% to 617,437 in FY26, during which it laid off more than 12,000 employees and paid ₹1,388 crore in severance.
The Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Ltd-owned company incurred additional costs of more than £800 million ( ₹10,233 crore) during the fiscal year, prompting management to introduce multiple cost-saving initiatives. The efforts gathered momentum after P.B. Balaji took over as chief executive in November 2025.
JLR is executing plans to save up to £1.7 billion ( ₹21,745 crore) to increase margins and reduce breakeven volumes to sales of 300,000 cars per year, according to its 14 May March quarter investor presentation.
“A large part of these reductions came from voluntary redundancy programmes. As part of one such programme, almost 500 managers left the business at the end of October 2025,” an executive aware of the matter said on the condition of anonymity. The company last saw a decline in overall headcount in the pandemic-hit FY22.
Tata group chairperson Natarajan Chandrasekaran first disclosed that JLR was taking measures to mitigate the impact of high US tariff-led cost hit in his June 2025 address at Tata Motors Ltd’s annual general meeting.
“The tariff impact will be primarily on JLR. The tariff has gone up from 2.5% to 27.5%, and under the UK-US FTA, the tariff is 10%. The overall impact would have been £1.6 billion. But due to the steps taken by JLR, the impact has gone down to £600 million, which is visible in the margin guidance,” he told shareholders.
Higher US tariffs on JLR imports and the September cyberattack dragged Tata Motors PV to its first annual revenue decline in five years in FY26 and pushed it into the red at the operating level.
The company saw its FY26 revenue fall 8% to ₹3.35 trillion as JLR volumes declined 23% to 308,000 units, and swung to an operating loss of ₹1,377 crore from a profit of ₹19,394 crore in FY25.
In his first annual remarks to shareholders in the annual report, Balaji struck an optimistic note about the company’s business opportunities in the year ahead.
“These challenges arrived with the global automotive industry already under continued pressure from cost inflation, slower-than-expected uptake of electric vehicles, and the deterioration of market conditions in China, including the lowering of the threshold for the luxury car tax, which affected pricing,” Balaji said in the message to shareholders.
“Following the cyber incident, we continue to invest in further strengthening our IT systems, and we continue to drive our Enterprise Missions to increase efficiency and control our costs,” he added.
After the events of the past year, the company would look to build leaner cost structures to improve profitability, according to experts.
“JLR’s restructuring should be viewed through the lens of profitability rather than headcount reduction alone. For me, the company is attempting to create a leaner cost structure after facing disruptions from cyber incidents, supply-chain volatility and tariffs,” said Amit Kaushik, founder at Mobidx Ai, a New Delhi-based automotive-focused intelligence firm.
“If successful, the gains should not only improve JLR’s margins but also strengthen dealer profitability through better inventory discipline, improved supply consistency and a healthier retail business model,” he added.
Ayaan Kartik is a Delhi-based journalist tracking the ever-growing world of automobiles and their components. With an experience of five years ranging from short-form news at Inshorts to longform journalism at Outlook Business magazine, he has dabbled into different storytelling formats. At Mint, he tries to regularly mix story styles, from longforms to crisp news stories. He has completed his graduation from Delhi University where he developed a liking for reading and writing about the world we live in today. Apart from automobiles, Ayaan likes to read up on geopolitics which has increasingly affected various sectors of the economy. Of all the promises journalism holds, he likes the fact that it allows a person to simply explain to readers about what is happening in the world. And what better sector than automobiles, which everyone since growing up has seen and felt connected to. Whether it is China's increasing grip on automobiles to growing affection for EVs in the country, Ayaan likes to connect his love for geopolitics and data to his stories as readers become more demanding on the types of stories they want.
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