Ford Motor Co, unwinding a two-decade luxury-car strategy, will provide more detailed financial data to bidders for UK-based Jaguar and Land Rover, the company's finance chief said.
"They've looked at some information," chief financial officer Don Leclair said in an interview on Thursday. Ford is sharing more materials because "there's another level of diligence" as the company pursues bids further, he said.
"We've concluded it's probable we will sell," Leclair said, declining to say how long the process might take. Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford received tentative bids last week, and hasn't disclosed the number or the bidders' identities.
Unloading Jaguar and Land Rover would free resources and management attention for returning Ford's North American automotive operations to profit. Ford sold UK-based Aston Martin in May and said on Thursday it's working on a "strategic review" of Sweden-based Volvo to be done by year's end.
Ford began its foray into European luxury brands in 1987 by buying a controlling stake in Aston Martin, which makes sports cars costing US$100,000 or more.
The US automaker bought Jaguar in 1989 for US$2.5 billion, Volvo in 1999 for US$6.45 billion and Land Rover in 2000 for US$2.73 billion. After putting Aston Martin on the block last year, Ford sold it for US$848 million to investors led by UK auto-racing champion David Richards.
On Friday, Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy raised his rating on Ford to "neutral" from "sell" after the automaker reported earnings of US$750 million for the second quarter, its first quarterly profit in two years.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS