Ford Stock Ends Year Down 19%

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 31, 9:15AM EST

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For Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) shareholders, 2024 has been a brutal year.
The stock’s underperformance reflects that Ford is running out of time to combat its challenges.

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Ford Stock Ends Year Down 19% — © gopixa / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

For Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) shareholders, 2024 has been a brutal year. The stock is down 19%, against an advance of 24% for the S&P 500. To add insult to injury, the shares of its primary rival, General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM), are higher by 49% for the period. Warranty problems have battered Ford, as has an ill-fated investment of billions of dollars in its electric vehicle (EV) business. It did not help that CEO Jim Farley described China’s car industry as an “existential threat.”

What Went Wrong

Ford struggles with several challenges.

Ford’s management believed it could take much of Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) business to the United States. In the third quarter of the year, according to CarEdge, total EV sales in America were 346,39. Tesla accounted for 166,923. Ford’s sales were 23,509. That put it behind Kia/Hyundai at 29,609 and GM at 32,095. Ford has little to show for an investment well into the billions of dollars. It lost over $100,000 for every EV sold in the first quarter of the year, which is a number that management disputes. A number even close to that signals an abject failure.

Ford’s warranty costs, which can be considered the costs of flaws in its products, added up to hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter this year. Ford does not give an exact figure, but the effect on earnings was $4.8 billion in 2023. Management continues to say it will address that major problem, but it has not.

Nearly every legacy car manufacturer in the world shares Ford’s China problem. The fact that Ford is part of that sector means headwinds are strong enough that they probably cannot be overcome. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that large car companies with operations in China have suffered massive drops in sales there. The other is that Chinese EV companies have started expanding worldwide with high-quality vehicles with low sticker prices.

This is the primary reason for Farley’s “existential threat” statement.

Ford’s share price reflects that it is running out of time to combat its challenges.

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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.