The specialized sports car manufacturer Lotus, now a part of the Chinese Geely automotive group, will have an Initial Public Offering (IPO) this year, 75 years after it was founded.

The IPO will occur on the Nasdaq stock market via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). Lotus will be housed under the umbrella of L Catterton Asian Acquisition Corp., a hedge fund controlled by the stock exchange house with the same name and by the French luxury group LVMH (minority interest).

With the operation, Lotus will be valued at $5,4 billion (some 5 billion euros). Geely retains an almost 90% stake in the company; the rest of the stock goes to L Catteron for a total amount of $288 million. Geely will additionally invest another $100 million in the newly formed Lotus Technology.

Lotus introduced its first model as a Geely daughter last year. The Eletre was also the first luxury SUV designed by this small English sports car manufacturer. The basic model is for sale in Belgium at a €97 690 starting price, and the top model Eletre R (with 918 hp) comes in at €153 090.

75th birthday

It was in 1948 that Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman (hence the ACBC logo), a passionate young British designer and engineer, built his first car, a modified Austin 7, in the garage of his girlfriend Hazel’s parents. He called his car the Mark I and entered it into local trials. Different models followed, each an improvement of the one before, and within four years, it became a business that he and Hazel called Lotus.

In 2023, exactly 75 years later, Lotus will be celebrating this significant milestone with a number of global events and initiatives. They will look back over seven and a half decades of innovation and success but also look forward to what the fourth quarter of the company’s first century will look like as Lotus continues its transformation from a UK sports car company to a global performance car business and brand, valued on the stock market.

Matt Windle, Group Vice-President and Managing Director of Lotus Cars, commented: “Lotus of 2023 is a world away from a garage in north London, thanks to the billions being invested in our company on product development, an electrified future, and more.”

“We’ve come a long way since moving to our iconic home in Norfolk in 1966,” he continued. “Today, we have engineering facilities in the UK, Germany, and China; design studios in Hethel, Coventry, and Shanghai; and new world-class manufacturing bases in Norfolk and China. It’s at the last of these that assembly of the first Lotus lifestyle car, the Eletre Hyper-SUV, begins later this month.”

“The pioneering spirit and commitment of Colin and Hazel Chapman are alive and kicking in Lotus today. We will be celebrating our 75th anniversary in style – paying tribute to the past and looking ahead to the future as we approach our first century,” he concluded.

Group Lotus

The Lotus group is composed of different companies. Lotus Cars is based in Hethel, Norfolk, UK, and is the global HQ for sports car and hypercar manufacturing operations, Lotus Advanced Performance, and the iconic 2,2-mile test track.

Lotus Engineering provides comprehensive consultancy services to many of the world’s OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers. It is headquartered at the Lotus Advanced Technology Center on the University of Warwick’s Wellesbourne Campus in the UK.

Lotus Tech is an affiliate company established as part of the Vision80 strategy established in 2018. With operational assets across China, the UK, and Europe, Lotus Tech is dedicated to delivering smart lifestyle battery electric vehicles (BEVs) such as the Eletre. Lotus Tech is focused on R&D in next-generation automobility technologies such as electrification, digitalization, and more.

In addition to the Lotus Eletre, Lotus Tech plans to launch further BEV models, including a sports sedan (Type 133), another SUV (Type 134), and more, as Vision80 reaches maturity in 2028.

Group Lotus is either the parent company of or affiliated with the above. In 2017, Geely Holding Group, one of the fastest-growing automotive groups in the world, acquired a 51% stake in Group Lotus. The other 49% is owned by Etika Automotive, a Malaysian conglomerate.