Ford Shares Down 32% in 2 Years

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 21, 6:45AM EST

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Ford Shares Down 32% in 2 Years — © Ford (CC BY 2.0) by Mike Mozart

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) shares are down 32% in the past two years. General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) stock is down 20%. Shares in Stellantis N.V. (NYSE: STLA), which owns Chrysler, are up 34%. Shares in Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) are up 20%. What happened?

Ford, among the group, has had several fumbles by management. The most apparent is its failure in the electric vehicle (EV) sector. The company said it would invest $30 billion in EVs by 2025. It keeps pulling back from that statement. Recently, it has not only pushed investment into the future, but it cut back production on its F-150 Lightning EV flagship. Ford sells about 700,000 F-150s a year, making it the top-selling vehicle in America. It should have been able to convert some of those to EV models. Instead, it sold less than 3,000 of them in January. (Check out the most fuel-efficient pickup trucks.)

Ford made ambitious claims and did not hit them. That is something that angers investors. Executive Chair Bill Ford said the Lightning launch was the most important in his career at the company. If so, how should Wall Street look at his entire tenure?

Ford lost in its battle with the United Auto Workers (UAW) over pay and benefits. This was true of Chrysler and GM as well. Nevertheless, it pulled down expectations for all three companies, damaging their share prices. Ford said the cost of the contract over its life would be $8.8 billion.

There is a sense that after a great promise two years ago and ambitions that excited investors, Ford is trapped with high costs and a lineup of EVs few people will buy.

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.