Ford Fleet Sales Account For Over 100% Of January Gains

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 2, 9:36PM EST · Published Feb 2, 4:36PM EST

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Ford (NYSE:F) did not bother to put it in the fine print, not exactly. The firm’s January sales rose 24.6% to 116,543 from 93,506. That includes 4,128 Volvos sold last month. Fleet sales represented more than 100% of the improvement in Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury units sold.

Sales of Ford, Lincoln and Mercury cars rose 43% to 41,050.. Sales of the Ford Fusion were up almost 50% to 12,179.

Fleet sales were clearly the hidden gem in Ford’s January sales, and allowed Ford to show an overall sales gain for the month. The company said “In January, Ford sales to fleet customers more than doubled last January’s depressed levels (up 154 percent) when most fleet owners deferred vehicle purchases due to the credit crunch and
uncertain business and economic conditions.”

Ford’s fleet sales were roughly 42,000 units compared to about 17,000 last year, a gain of 25,000. The total increase in sales of Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury sales for the month was less than 22%.

Thank god for fleet buyers.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.