Hornby’s chief executive, Richard Ames, has quit less than a week after the model railway maker issued a third profit warning in five months and said it risked breaching a lending agreement with its bank.

Ames will leave with immediate effect after less than two years in the job. Roger Canham, the chairman, will run the company for the foreseeable future, Hornby said.

Last week Hornby said it expected to lose as much as £6m this year, far more than expected after three profit warnings since September. It also said it was in danger of breaching a banking covenant with Barclays, potentially prompting the bank to call in the debt and threaten Hornby with collapse.

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The company, which also makes Airfix kits, Corgi cars and Scalextric, was hit by a series of setbacks as Ames tried to overhaul its operations. UK sales fell last summer because of disruption caused by new computer systems while business in Europe was also affected by the revamp and the non-arrival of products from China.

Sales in Britain recovered in December but then plunged after Christmas as retailers decided not to order new stocks. Hornby was forced to write off £1m of items at its new warehouse and European sales remained below expectations.

Shares fell more than 60% after last week’s announcement, the company’s worst day of trading since it listed on the stock exchange in 1986. Shares rose 10% to 27p after Ames’s departure was announced on Monday but are still worth less than a quarter of their value in late August.

Ames said last week Hornby had a supportive relationship with Barclays, to which it owes £9m, and that it was in talks with the bank. Hornby’s woes prompted the former Top Gear presenter James May to encourage his followers to buy a Hornby train set to save the company.

Ames, 45, joined in April 2014 from Ladbrokes and was given the job of turning around Hornby, which had been bedevilled for years by problems with its Chinese supplier. Hornby extricated itself from the contract shortly before he joined but then hit trouble with the new manufacturer as products failed to make it on to shelves in Italy and other European markets.

As part of his attempted overhaul, Ames moved the company’s warehouse and head office from its historic location near Margate, Kent, to a site near Canterbury and decided to relocate the popular visitor centre to nearby Ramsgate. Canham will be executive chairman for the second time after running Hornby for a spell before Ames joined.