Ford Stock Hit by CEO, China and Lack of Product

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 6, 6:15AM EST

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Ford Stock Hit by CEO, China and Lack of Product — © Ford Motor Co.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) stock plunged and just missed a 52-week low. Investors are concerned about its lack of electric and self-driving vehicles, its disaster in China and the profound doubt about the turnaround plans of CEO Jim Hackett. Hackett reports to Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr., which further complicates how the company is run.

Ford’s fourth-quarter results were brutal, as was the company’s forecast. Revenue dropped 5% to $39.7 billion in the fourth quarter, and Ford posted a net loss of $1.7 billion for the period.

Ford and its joint venture partners in China sold 567,854 vehicles in China last year, off 26.1% compared to 2018. China is the world’s largest car market, although it had a down year in 2019. The conventional wisdom, however, is that if a global car company cannot show strong sales and revenue in China, it has no means to foster optimism about its future.

Ford’s total 2019 vehicle sales in the United States fell 3% to 2,422,698. Without good sales of its wildly popular F-Series full-sized pickup, the numbers would be worse. It accounted for 37% of sales in the region.

So far, the only Ford major advance in the electric car business is the Mustang Mach-E. It also has a driver assistance package. However, Hackett, who has been in the job for almost two years, has not delivered on his forecast for a larger fleet of cars and trucks with similar features. He has also not shown more than a small part of plans to restructure.

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Investors also face the question of who runs Ford. Founding family member and executive board chair, William Clay Ford Jr., has Hackett report to him. Are Ford’s struggles Hackett’s or the executive chair’s responsibility? The question further clouds Ford’s future.

Does it matter who runs Ford now? Perhaps not so much, if results continue to nosedive.

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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.