Bentley boss at chamber lunch
The Chairman and chief executive of luxury of car maker Bentley Motors, Adrian Hallmark, attended the Black Country Chamber of Commerce's annual president's lunch.
The Wolverhampton educated mechanical engineer attended Deansfield High and Wolverhampton Polytechnic - now the University of Wolverhampton.
He now heads up one of the world’s largest luxury car brands and is presiding over a period of sequential crises, rapid growth, and technological transformation.
There has been a formidable resurgence for Bentley since he returned to the company in 2018, having left 13 years earlier to work at Volkswagen, Saab and then Jaguar Land Rover.
Mr Hallmark started his career in NEI Thompson as a design engineer.
He spent 10 years at Porsche GB, latterly as its chief executive, and then moved to Bentley in 1999 to define and launch the breakthrough strategy and stayed within the group moving to the US as chief executive of Volkswagen of America.
A move to Germany as Executive Director for Asia was followed by a brief stint at Saab before joining JLR in 2010 as Jaguar chief executive, and latterly group strategy director.
Chamber members from across the region joined Mr Hallmark at The Mount Hotel in Wolverhampton as he spoke about how Bentley readied the business for the impact of Brexit, closed for 12 weeks during Covid-19 and developed core competence at risk and crisis management plans whilst accelerating a three-year plan into six months and developed an innovative and radical future strategy to secure £3 billion of investment in the Crewe factory.
The Chamber’s new chief executive Sarah Moorhouse – the retiring president – and chamber patrons and Platinum Group members also attended the lunch.
