This paper reports the development of a three-phase permanent magnet claw pole motor with soft magnetic composite stator, taking advantage of the unique properties of the material. Advanced design and performance analysis methods were employed, such as the three-dimensional finite element analysis of magnetic fields for parameter calculation and dimension optimisation, rotational core loss models combined with finite element method for core loss prediction, and hybrid thermal model with distributed heat sources for the temperature rise calculation, etc. The design and analyse methods are validated by experiment on the prototype driven by a brushless DC drive scheme.