What a way to start a second century in business.
Your stock price is at around US$10 a share, US$20 below where it was four years ago. Foreign automakers threaten even more of your market share, adding new models and manufacturing capacity in North America. One respected analyst even says it's not out of the question that you could be forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy within a decade.
Ford Motor Co, which turns 100 on Monday, has rarely seen such trying times.
Chairman and chief executive Bill Ford Jr. remains upbeat. In a recent interview with national automotive journalists, Ford said his job has been brutal, but he's confident the company is on track to return to a profit.
The great-grandson of founder Henry Ford said he and other senior managers are planning beyond the restructuring now under way. But the key for now is to remain focused on cutting costs and producing high-quality vehicles -- two areas where the company struggled not too long ago.
Some analysts say Ford must emerge even leaner from its turnaround effort -- now 18 months old. Bill Ford acknowledges he's not as concerned with keeping the title of ``world's second-largest automaker'' as he is with running a company that's competitive and profitable.
``No one gives up anything willingly, but I think we've seen in the past that being big isn't necessarily best,'' Ford said. ``I'm much more concerned with us doing everything well and being seen as doing everything well.''
Ford considers the fundamental business much unchanged from the days his great-grandfather ran the company in the 1920s and 1930s: assemble vehicles in factories and sell and service them through a network of dealers. But it's hard to believe that even a visionary like Henry Ford could have imagined the scope of today's industry.
Ford Motor Co. itself has grown from a business started with US$28,000, some tools and a few designs to a US$163 billion global enterprise with 350,000 employees. The company that began with 10 employees assembling cars in a converted wagon factory in downtown Detroit now operates in more than 200 markets on six continents.
This year, however, Ford is coming off two years in which it lost a total of US$6.4 billion, faced the disastrous Firestone tire recall and ventured into a variety of consumer services that analysts say took its focus off the core job of producing cars and trucks.
Despite Ford's slumping stock price, an uninvited takeover would be nearly impossible because of the way the family established its ownership stake when the company went public in 1956. The family controls a 40 percent voting stake through its ownership of special Class B stock.
Since replacing the ousted Jacques Nasser as CEO in October 2001, Bill Ford has concentrated on slashing expenses and beefing up the automaker's product offering.
Ford's goal is to improve profits by US$9 billion by mid-decade, and part of that effort is to trim expenses by US$500 million this year. Chief Financial Officer Allan Gilmour told Wall Street analysts last month the company would ``beat the bejesus'' out of that figure, but he wouldn't elaborate.
In the same meeting, Bill Ford reiterated the company's goal of earning 70 cents a share this year and said plans to introduce 65 new Ford, Lincoln and Mercury products in North America in the next five years should ease concerns he's heard from analysts about a lacking portfolio.
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