Ford Is America’s Worst-Run Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 29, 6:40AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Ford Is America’s Worst-Run Company — © Toa55 / iStock via Getty Images

24/7 Wall St. Insights

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) has proven time and again that it is the worst-run American corporation.
Management has nothing new to say about EV losses, warranty costs, and more.
Also: Dividend legends to hold forever.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) is the worst-run among all of America’s largest public companies. It has proven that month after month, quarter after quarter, and year after year. It has been proven based on its terrible strategic decisions and because it builds low-quality vehicles. Charting a zig-zag course toward what it believes should be successful has proven it. So has its market cap of $45 billion, while Tesla’s is $485 billion. And it has proven it because its shares are down almost 10% this year, while the shares of crosstown rival General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) are higher by 47%.

Here Is the Proof

EV losses, warranty costs, and more.

Ford’s new quarterly report lists symptoms. Net income fell to about $900 million, partly because of earlier investment in the electric vehicle (EV) initiative. Revenue rose 5% to $46.2 billion. Much of this could be attributed to pickups, led by the F-Series, which accounts for more than 33% of its sales in the United States.

Ford lost another $1.2 billion on its EV projects. Management once said it would invest $30 billion in the sector. At one point, it said it would produce 600,000 EVs annually by the end of 2023. It then pushed that to 2024. Ford never had a chance to do this. It even planned to build 150,000 of its EV flagship F-150 Lighting. It barely sells a few thousand a month. As it bungled those decisions, it changed the price of the Lightning four times.

Ford’s warranty costs hit earnings enough in the previous quarter that it drove the stock down. During the most recently reported quarter, Ford said its annual profit would be toward the low end of estimates because of warranty expenses. Ford claimed it would fix this issue in a significant story in The Wall Street Journal, published on August 6, 2022. Among the article’s points was that when current CEO Jim Farley took over in October 2020, improved quality was one of his primary goals. That was four years ago.

Nothing New to Say

A broken record.

Comments made quarter after quarter by Chief Financial Officer John Lawler are no longer believable. His most recent was, “We need to move faster, bottom line, and warranty needs to be a big part of that. We need to accelerate our pace to outrun what our competitors are doing.” These comments have become a broken record.

Ford is a wreck, and it continues to prove that regularly.

Ford Price Prediction and Forecast 2025-2030

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.