Ford's Foreign Ops Deliver $100m Profit
Ford's CEO Alan Mulally might disagree with whoever said "you can't cut your way to profitability." After cutting jobs, cutting salaries, cutting supply complexity and cutting entire divisions, Ford reported a first quarter net profit of $100m. That's a lot better than first quarter last year, when they turned in a deficit of $282m. But wait… The Wall Street Journal reports that FoMoCo earned (pretax) $257m in South America, $739m in Europe and $1m in Asia and Africa. Ford Credit added another $36m to the company's coffers. However, North America — the one region where they made the most cuts– showed a pretax loss of $45m. Just like their RenCen friends, the Blue Oval's North American operation is being kept afloat by their overseas operations. Maybe instead of cutting so much, Ford needs to look at what the other regions are doing right (hint: it begins with "p", ends with "t" and rhymes with "brod muckt"). Meanwhile, expect a glowing second quarter report in July when the cash from the sale of Land Rover and Jaguar hits the books.
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RobertSD, The Toyota site in Japan can shed some light on that. I forget exactly what to click... Toyota Worldwide Oh, wait, That was easy... Feb data is the latest, though. Looks like their overseas sales are much bigger than domestic sales but production is fairly close to 50/50.
I guess buying that Fusion wasn't the worst decision i ever made. Mind you, I actually really like the car. And I say this after the fact that I agree with what a lot of TTAC has to say.
Its good to see they're doing something well. Hopefully they'll bring over the fantastic Mazda2/Fiesta and start kicking some ass in the sub-compact market (the only legitimate competitor for this car is the Fit Sport). And now they just need to ditch Volvo.
Still. Need. Falcon.