Big shot of the week
Andy Palmer’s business card could turn a room full of grown men applegreen with envy. no, I don’t mean like that daft scene in American Psycho where Brooks Brothers- clad bankers compete over who’s got the flashiest design. (‘That off-white colouring... oh my God it even has a watermark!’) I’m talking about what’s actually written on it.
Engraved in 16-point characters across the middle, it reads: Andy Palmer, CEO, Aston Martin.
Palmer’s the man at the helm of one of the best-loved brands in British business, creator of those beautifully designed cars with the panther-like V8 growl and more curves than Ursula Andress. As James Bond’s car dealer of choice, he’s also in charge of fitting the necessary gadgets to 007’s latest runaround. How wonderful is that?
Palmer drives to Aston’s headquarters near Silverstone each day in a beautiful 1980 V8 Vantage like the one Timothy dalton sports in The Living daylights. neighbours, however, are unlikely to mistake him for a top-level secret agent.
HISface is podgy, his hair thinning and he speaks in a jovial West Midlands burr, a hangover from his Stratford upbringing.
despite those saggy jowls, he claims he was quite sporty in his youth and was an accomplished badminton player. now he prefers to spend his weekends racing his sporty Aston GT4 (he competed in Le Mans in June) and zoom around on his BMW motorbike. This is a man, one suspects, who has Castrol GTX coursing through his veins.
This week has been an eventful one for Palmer and his firm. Aston went public on Wednesday, making
it the first car company to trade on the London Stock Exchange since Jaguar departed in 1990.
The float has suffered a minor misfire. After pricing its shares at £19, which would have put the chief executive’s 0.6pc stake at £28m, they quickly slid to £18, leaving it short of a coveted spot on the FTSE 100.
despite now holding a Phd and several swotty engineering degrees, Palmer didn’t much like school. After failing his 11-plus, he packed it in at 16 to become an engineer like his father. He enrolled in a four-year apprenticeship with UK Automotive Products, which eventually took him on full time.
These were gloomy times for the British car industry. With his employer regularly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Palmer moved to Austin Rover while studying for a management degree by night.
Meanwhile his work brought him into contact with Honda. The sleek working methodology at the Japanese car maker couldn’t have been more at odds with the haphazard approach at his British employer.
When a job came up at nissan six years later in 1991, Palmer jumped at the chance to work with engineers from the Far East.
He spent the next 24 years at the firm, indoctrinating himself in kaizen – the Japanese philosophy for continuous improvement. After a string of senior posts in Europe, he moved to Japan in 2002 where he became a trusted consigliere to the firm’s icy boss, Carlos Ghosn.
When Aston Martin came knocking in 2014, he was effectively the number three at nissan. Aston, meanwhile, had been passed from pillar to post, no one ever seemingly able to make money out of it.
It was a risky move, switching to a manufacturer struggling to remain liquid. But Palmer had always wanted to be head of a car firm and Ghosn was clearly going nowhere.
Palmer took his Japanese wife Hitomi and daughter – he has three other children from a previous marriage – back to England and busily set about returning the brand to profitability.
Looking into the future, Palmer says he wants to launch a new car each year. Late in 2019, production is due to start on the dBX, Aston’s first SUV, which he hopes will attract more women to the brand.
He’s in no panic over the stock market hiccup, urging people to take a view over the longer term. Egg-headed analysts have been haughtily sucking the wind between their teeth and querying Palmer’s timing. But then what do these guys do other than spend 14hour days in air-conditioned offices staring at numbers on a screen?
Andy Palmer builds cars for James Bond. I know who I’d rather listen to.