Ford Motor Company had a first quarter that was much better than analysts expected. It recorded in its ledger a net income of $100 million, which compares favorably to the $282 million it lost during the same quarter last year. Revenue fell 8% to $39.4 billion, but that doesn't include the sale of Jaguar / Land Rover. Of course, market's outside the U.S. are what helped Ford the most, with South America, Ford Europe and the Asia Pacific Africa regions all contributing to the cause. But Ford's home market in North America didn't do as much damage to the bottom line as analysts thought it would. Here in the U.S., Ford reported a pre-tax loss of $45 million, which is a major improvement over the $613 million lost last year. Most of that improvement is due to cost-cutting measures that saved the automaker $1.2 billion and includes not only reducing the volume of cars produced, but also reducing the workforce. Ford has already offered buyouts to 54,000 UAW workers, and going forward plans to offer targeted buyouts to specific plants and workers building specific vehicles. Ford also shaved 20,000 vehicles off of the total number of vehicles it plans to build in Q2 2008, bringing the number down to 710,000 or 101,000 fewer cars than Q2 2007.

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/04/24/f...-income-in-q1/

 

Thanks for the posting, Red Star! I'm rather startled that Ford turned at least a quarterly profit a year ahead of Mulally's profitability target of 2009. The first quarter is usually lame compared to the second and third quarters, so this is a great start for 2008! If they can continue downsizing the company to reach that point wherein the production capacity remaining is just sufficient to build the vehicles sold/ordered plus a minimal extra volume for showroom display, they will be the envy of the industry.

For this to work best, unfortunately, Linc & Merc probably have to be sent down the dusty road of automotive history. Better that than Linc, Merc, AND Ford being sent down that dusty road together. There might be some niche that a single model of Linc could occupy profitably, but I just can't see Merc having anything to offer that can't be found in a Ford.

Keep up the good work--it was some brilliant salesmanship that managed to hang the albatross of Jaguar around some other company's neck!

Greg "Ates" Eights