Ford Returns to Monthly Sales Reporting

Over the last few years, the brunt of the automotive industry gradually swapped to quarterly sales reporting. This includes Ford Motor Co., which claimed ditching the monthly model helped smooth out variances caused by fleet orders. Most automakers gave similar answers, suggesting quarterly updates would actually paint a more accurate picture of their overall health — likely hoping this would discourage investors from being scared away during a particularly rough month.

But Ford has reportedly had a change of heart and is moving back to monthly updates. While we’re happy to see it bucking the trend, it’s curious to see any automaker doing so while the industry is so vulnerable to anomalies created by government lockdowns.

Blue Oval said it’s keen to give investors more information, especially with the pandemic casting a dark shadow over the industry. Ford’s new CEO, Jim Farley, has also discussed the need for transparency on numerous occasions since taking the big office.

“My commitment to each of you is transparency, including purposeful, measurable key performance indicators so you can objectively track our progress,” Farley told market analysts late last month.

Unfortunately, Ford’s U.S. sales fell 6.1 percent in October vs the same period in 2019. But some of that can be attributed to retooling facilities for the F-Series pickup, which remains the company’s best-selling model. Truck sales were extremely healthy for the brand prior to October, especially compared to sedans (which Ford has intentionally been moving away from) and a noteworthy decline in van sales — the latter of which saw a 24 percent drop in October.

It’s not a great showing for the company when the industry as a whole enjoyed a slight 0.9-percent uptick in volume from a year earlier. But we now have more context as to why Ford’s numbers could have been better. More importantly for the company, so do investors.

While Honda, Hyundai/Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Toyota, and Volvo have been rocking monthly reports through 2020, the rest of the industry is running quarterly updates and none seemed interested in changing after we asked. But these kinds of things have a way of catching on. Ford wasn’t the first company to swap to quarterly reports in 2019. It was just following General Motors as the industry jumped onto a new trend. Maybe going back to monthlies will become the next industrial craze after rivals realize everyone now likes Ford a little more for having blazed the trail back toward genuine transparency.

[Image: Image: Ford Motor Co.]