Mark Fields licenziato: non è più il CEO di FO.MO.CO.

[pennellotref]

http://www.autonews.com/article/20170522/OEM02/170529994/ford-ousts-ceo-fields-names-ex-steelcase-chief-jim-hackett-to-take

 

Cita

Ford ousts CEO Fields, names ex-Steelcase chief Jim Hackett to take over in management shakeup, reports say

 

 

May 22, 2017 @ 12:01 am

Michael Martinez 

 

Fields had been under pressure for the company's lagging stock price and lower-than-expected profits so far this year. Photo credit: Bloomberg

 

DETROIT -- Ford Motor Co. has fired CEO Mark Fields and will replace him with James Hackett, head of the automaker’s Smart Mobility arm, as part of a broad management shakeup, according to reports by Forbes and other news organizations. 

Ford has scheduled a news conference at its Dearborn headquarters for 9:45 a.m. Eastern time Monday.

Ford would not confirm the reports, saying in a statement: "We are staying focused on our plan for creating value and profitable growth. We do not comment on speculation or rumors.

Hackett, 62, former CEO of office furniture maker Steelcase, was on Ford’s board from 2013 until last year, when he took charge of Ford Smart Mobility.

Ford created that subsidiary last year to handle its investments in autonomous vehicles and new mobility services. Fields has been pouring billions into self-driving cars and ride-sharing experiments as its traditional car business has struggled in a slowing U.S. market.

In other reported moves, Jim Farley, president of Ford’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, will oversee Ford’s regions, global marketing and sales, and Lincoln Motor Co., The Detroit News reported. Joe Hinrichs, head of the Americas, will manage global product development, manufacturing and labor affairs, purchasing, and environmental and safety engineering, The News said, citing anonymous sources.

Marcy Klevorn, vice president of information technology and chief technical officer, will take over Hackett’s role as chairman of Ford Smart Mobility, according to The News, which said the company finalized the decision in a Friday board meeting.

Forbes reported that Ray Day, Ford’s head of communications, will be replaced by Mark Truby, who currently heads Ford’s Asia Pacific communications.

Jim Hackett

Stock down

Fields, 56, had been under pressure for the company’s lagging stock price and lower-than-expected profits so far this year.  Board members had recently reportedly questioned Fields’ strategy for the future of the company, which relies on heavy investments in driverless and electric vehicle technology. Since Fields took over as CEO from Alan Mullally in July 2014, Ford’s stock price has fallen nearly 40 percent.

Last week, Ford announced it would slash 1,400 salaried workers in North America and Asia as a cost-cutting move as it continues to spend on what it calls “emerging opportunities.” That type of move, normally reserved for distressed business units and economic downturns, came amid a relative boom time for the industry.

Since Fields took over as CEO from Alan Mullally in July 2014, Ford's stock price has fallen nearly 40 percent. Photo credit: Bloomberg

Ford career

Before he was named CEO, Fields served in a number of positions, including COO and president of the Americas. During his time leading the Americas, Fields was the architect of Ford’s “Way Forward” plan to restructure the business as its profits disappeared during the last industry downturn. He also served as CEO of Mazda.

When he took over for Mulally in 2014, Fields inherited an automaker on the verge of posting record profits. He also oversaw the transformation of the profit-generating F-150 to include an aluminum body, as well as dozens of other product launches. Fields also appointed a separate president to head the Lincoln Motor Co. in an effort to revive the luxury brand.

Executives, including Chairman Bill Ford, praised Fields early on and said the transition between CEOs had been seamless.

But Fields came under fire in recent years as Wall Street remained unimpressed with Ford’s profits and plans for the future. At last year’s annual meeting, one shareholder even asked to bring back Mulally -- a popular figure who helped save the company during the financial crisis.

 

 

[TurboGimmo]

Più il,taglio del,personale..

Acque tempestose in ford

[nucarote]

Se nemmeno dopo aver venduto Volvo, PAG, partecipazione in Mazda e dismesso Aston  e gamme integrate con prodotti pensati per altri mercati, riescono ad avere conti in ordine, mi sa che devono pensare a qualche buon matrimonio che so tipo FCA? 

[TurboGimmo]

magari e' anche un problema di ingegnerizzazione che drena risorse abbattendo i ricavi..

 

Nei meandri del forum gira un bell'articolo, non so esattamente di quanti anni fa, e diceva che le ore di manodopera per assemblare una Focus erano il doppio di quelle necessarie per mettere insieme una koreana equivalente.

[nucarote]

Sicuramente avranno più di un problema, ma uno di questi IMHO è la mancanza di prodotti davvero accattivanti che gli facciano fare parecchio margine e il non avere marchi premium worldwide.

[pennellotref]

http://jalopnik.com/why-mark-fields-was-fired-1795431562

 

Cita

Why Mark Fields Was Fired

Ryan Felton

 

 

 

Ford groomed Mark Fields to assume the automaker’s top position for a long time, but his tenure as CEO will be short-lived. On Sunday the company announced that he’ll be officially replaced amid a downturn in the auto industry and concerns over Ford’s stock price. So what happened?

 

Fields was given the dignified way out, as he was officially allowed to “retire.” But genuine retirement plans are always long, drawn-out affairs, planned out years in advance. Just look at FCA head honcho Sergio Marchionne, who has made no secret about his plans to bail in 2019.

 

 

They don’t dump the guy on a Monday morning and have his successor do all the press conferences. But we’re sure Fields will be fine. He’s made tons of money in his career, and will probably do alright in whatever he chooses to do next. Basket weaving, or whatever.

But it’s not like Ford has been circling the drain. So what went wrong?

Much of what Ford has described as the company’s ‘new direction’ is exactly what Fields championed during his tenure as CEO. The real reasons for his departure are much more clear: Fields might have said he supported ‘the future,’ but he showed no results, he bungled Trump, Ford’s car sales fell harder than the industry standard and Ford’s stock price took a dive under his watch.

‘A Time Of Unprecedented Change’

By the sound of what executive chairman Bill Ford said at a press conference Monday morning, Ford didn’t think Fields acted enough like his counterpart at General Motors, Mary Barra. Under new Ford CEO Jim Hackett, Bill Ford said the automaker needs to address “underperforming areas,” modernize its business and invest in The Future. Yes, The Future.

But Ford has lagged behind General Motors, particularly on autonomous vehicles and electric cars. GM has had a number of milestones this past year, with its investment in the autonomous tech start-up Cruise, as well as the rollout of the Bolt EV. As for “underperforming areas,” Barra also oversaw GM’s departure from Russia and India, along with the sale of its European operations to PSA Group.

“This is a time of unprecedented change,” Bill Ford said. “A time of great change requires a transformational leader,” he added.

Stock 35 Percent Down

Publicly-held corporations are beholden to their investors. In that sense, Ford’s had little to cheer about Fields. Since taking the reins in 2014, Ford’s stock price has slid 35 percent, despite soaring profits and the F-150 serving as a helpful bolster.

 

 

And while car sales are trending downward across the industry, Ford far exceeded the total industry’s decline. Ford dropped a staggering 25 percent,as The New York Times notes.

So what’s there for investors to be excited about?

At the press conference, Hackett—a former CEO of furniture maker Steelcase who briefly ran the University of Michigan’s athletic program—at least hinted that Ford needs to start delivering in order to turn its stock price around: “That’s a consequence that comes after we do the things we say we’re going to do,” he said.

Failing To Bring His Much-Championed Future

When it comes to “things,” Ford’s riding high on what’s considered the future—autonomous vehicles, electrified platforms, shared mobility. All the industry jargon buzzwords of the moment you can think of, Ford’s on it.

 

Fields’ ambitions to helm Ford’s transition into a smart mobility company, producing autonomous and electric vehicles—rolling out a City of Tomorrow—have been well intentioned, given the industry’s intense focus on bringing robot cars to production. Ford has said it plans to have an autonomous vehicle ready to go by 2021 for ride-hailing purposes.

But look at its standing in the field currently: FCA has teamed up with Google’s Waymo, one of the clear leaders in the robot car race. GM’s logging serious mileage on its AV tests; has a huge investment in Lyft, which could help bring autonomous vehicles onto the scene far sooner; and it’s debuting the semi-autonomous Super Cruise feature for Cadillac later this year.

 

 

Put simply, Ford’s standing hasn’t been exactly strong. Whether Hackett’s going to speed-up its efforts wasn’t immediately clear Monday. Hackett danced around questions related to the 2021 goal a number of times, offering a very generalized remark about the coming years.

“The way we’re going to win the hearts and minds of everybody is to have great ideas that work, and Ford has put a decade into the AV development and it’s really coming along,” he said. And we’re ready to talk about it we’re going to be really clear about it.” Doesn’t really inspire confidence, I’m sure, but it’s only day one.

It Was Trump, Too

Shortly after the press conference Monday, the Wall Street Journal published a story, citing an unnamed person familiar with Ford’s board of directors thinking, that said Fields’ relationship with Donald Trump also played a rolein his departure.

 

A longtime Ford executive, Mr. Fields is seen as having unnecessarily put the iconic car company on President Donald Trump’s radar during last year’s campaign, according to a person familiar with the board’s thinking. As then-candidate Mr. Trump was railing on companies that make products in Mexico and ship them to U.S. stores, Mr. Fields boldly told shareholders about a plan to move production of the Ford Focus from Michigan to San Luis Potosí.

What Mr. Fields didn’t make clear was that the auto maker had specific products in mind to replace the Focus and preserve jobs, the person said. Mr. Trump pounced, painting the 114-year-old auto maker founded by Henry Ford as the poster child for outsourcing and Exhibit A of why the North American Free Trade Agreement was bad for American workers, including the roughly 150,000 factory workers employed by Detroit’s Big 3.

The decision by Fields amounted to a political misfire, setting Ford up to be a routine punching bag for Trump on the campaign trail. After the election, Trump took aim at vehicle-emissions standards set by Barack Obama’s administration, and, eventually, Fields slithered up to the new president’s sideand tried to win his good graces. In the interim period before Trump took office, Fields abruptly announced that a $1.6 billion investment for a new factory in Mexico would be canceled, despite earlier pronouncements otherwise.

The actions Mr. Fields took in the span between Mr. Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president and Inauguration Day only created more confusion, the person said, and ended up costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost investment due to the cancellation of the San Luis Potosi plant.

It’s probably no surprise the 2016 election played a role here, but Fields particularly handled the ascent of Trump clumsily from an investor’s perspective.

Faster Decision-Making

Maybe this wasn’t intended to be a jab at Fields, but Bill Ford emphasized at the press conference Monday and to several news outlets that the automaker needs to be quicker on its feet.

“We need to speed up our decision-making,” he said, giving you a sense that Fields had a tendency to trudge through business at a glacial pace. This probably has more to say about the way Ford organized its C-suite—evident by the major reorganization of the executive structure announced alongside the CEO shake-up.

But clearly things weren’t moving at a clip with Fields that Ford would’ve liked to have seen. The Times pointed out that Ford has dealt with an uptick of safety recalls in recent years, and—similar to the rest of the industry—sales of small and midsize cars have dropped. Yet little appeared to change.

“We’re moving from a position of strength to transform Ford for the future,” Bill Ford said in a statement.

 

Now, we’ll see if Hackett can bring Ford’s future vision to life.

 

Personalmente aggiungerei anche l'offerta parziale di SUV/CUV rispetto a GM ed FCA (accusa rivolta a Ford da più parti) e la connessa figura barbina fatta dal marchio di Dearborn lo scorso novembre a Los Angeles quando ha presentato la versione USA della EcoSport (ossia il B-SUV del marchio, B-SUV che in USA stravendono) salvo poi dichiarare che la stessa sarebbe uscita in commercio dopo DUE () anni

Modificato 22 Maggio 2017 da pennellotref

[erriquezz]

BUM!

 

Fields, uno che ha militato per anni nell'ovale blu fino a raggiungere il vertice fatto fuori dopo appena tre anni.

Personalmente mi stava simpatico meno di zero, troppo "costruito", ma non ho visto granché della sua gestione perché andai via qualche mese dopo il suo arrivo.

 

IMHO Ford paga ora alcune scelte strategiche effettuate dai predecessori di Fields (es. divorzio da Mazda e chiusure di impianti con linee di montaggio già pronte per le nuove vetture con conseguenti ritardi sul debutto europeo di alcuni modelli).

 

Spero sia rimasto il meraviglioso posto che ho avuto la fortuna di conoscere, in cui si cresce e ci si sente gratificati per il proprio lavoro.

Modificato 22 Maggio 2017 da erriquezz
caxxata su Hackett...

[pennellotref]

http://www.autonews.com/article/20170523/COPY01/305239976

 

Cita

Ford's leadership reboot brings focus on Europe

 

LONDON -- Ford's sudden replacement of CEO Mark Fields with turnaround specialist Jim Hackett has put its European operations under scrutiny -- with industry watchers speculating whether the company will exit the region like its crosstown rival General Motors.

Europe is making a profit for Ford again after three years of losses between 2011 and 2015, but the margin is still very thin at just 2.3 percent for the first quarter.

Ford also faces the same market pressures GM faced:

• Increasing competition from premium brands targeting mainstream customers

• Rising development costs for small vehicles that are too sophisticated for most other global markets

• Toughening regulatory pressures on tailpipe emissions, especially for diesel cars, which account for half of Europe's market but don't sell in big numbers elsewhere.

"We need to speed-up decision making and address under-performing areas," Bill Ford, the automaker's executive chairman, told analysts and reporters on Monday when announcing Hackett's appointment.

Hackett, 62, turned office furniture manufacturer, Steelcase, into a global leader and has led the Ford unit developing self-driving cars and related projects for the past year.

GM's focus on improving shareholder value by selling its unprofitable European brands, Opel and Vauxhall, to France's PSA Group, as well as quitting tough markets such as Russia, India and South Africa led to criticism from investors that Fields was moving too slowly to restructure the automaker.

Tackling problem areas

"Those things are front and center on the agenda — very quickly," Hackett told the Detroit News in an interview on Monday, referring to Ford's presence in India and the future of small cars in the U.S. market where SUV sales are booming. "There’s a long list like that. We will address all those."

Ford has already shown it will quit markets that aren't working for the company, including last year Japan and Indonesia. It is scaling back its car production in Thailand to focus on pickups.

Ford said earlier this month it plans to cut 1,400 salaried jobs in North America and Asia through voluntary early retirement and other financial incentives to help boost its sagging stock price. Those cuts will not apply to Ford in Europe where last year the automaker reduced its workforce by 1,000 to 52,000, mostly losing white-collar jobs. However, unions fear Ford is preparing to ax jobs in the UK following Brexit and have said they will fight potential job losses of 1,160 at the automaker's engine plant in Bridgend, Wales.

Europe as a whole has a 21 percent manufacturing overcapacity in 2016, according to a IHS Markit analysis cited by Ford in its 2016 financial report. Ford didn't mention what its capacity figure was for Europe, where it has 16 plants.

Brexit effect

The U.K. is Ford's biggest European market, but Ford has said its 2017 European profits will be lower because of the pound has collapsed since Britons voted last June to leave the EU, making its cars more expensive. The company posted a record $1.2 billion European profit last year. In the first quarter pretax profit in Europe was $176 million, its eighth-consecutive quarterly profit.

Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said Hackett will face the same challenges as outgoing CEO Fields did including a thin product cycle as the U.S. market has become more challenging, incremental contribution cost in recently launched products, and lower earnings in Europe following Brexit,

Ford will need to re-evaluate areas of the business where it continues to struggle to meet its cost of capital just as GM has done by exiting from regions and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has done by abandoning some segments, Ellinghorst said.

"Ford should consider regional and product exposures as well as the future of Lincoln," he wrote in a note to investors.

Better shape

Bernstein analyst Max Warburton believes Ford is unlikely to follow GM and quit Europe. "Ford of Europe is in better shape than GM Europe. European industry pricing is the best it has been in 20 years," he told Automotive News Europe.

"I also sense that the Ford family have an emotional attachment to Europe. And even if they did want out, the only buyer in town just bought GM Europe."

Ford has a strong manufacturing footprint in low-cost eastern Europe and Turkey, which GM didn’t have. Ford builds the EcoSport small SUV in Romania and vans in Turkey. Its vans were market leaders in Europe in 2016, according to Ford.

Ford also has worked to reduce capacity in the region over the last few years, closing its factory in Genk, Belgium, and two plants in the UK.

Apart from anything else, Ford doesn't have a standalone brand to sell to another player in Europe, like GM did with Opel and Vauxhall. A buyer could hardly continue to use the Ford name.

But the problem is unlikely to arise. Said Warburton: "My guess is ‎Hackett will have lots to focus on before he needs to worry about Europe."

 

Se è vero, sospetto che agli americani la crisi del 2008 non abbia insegnato proprio nulla....

[Matteo B.]

Beh, nel 2009 Ford è stata l'unica a non chiedere soldi al governo USA...

 

Detto questo, per me a prodotti è peggiorata tantissimo. Avevano l'accordo tecnologico con Mazda che per conto mio gli ha portato prodotti buoni. hanno abbandonato tutto loro (non è stata Mazda a divorziare) e adesso sono in braghe di tela.

 

boh.....

[pennellotref]

Se Ford decide di seguire l'esempio , si fa per dire, di GM il rischio cui gli USA vanno incontro è quello della riproposizione del fenomeno di balcanizzazione di cui l'industria automobilistica americana ha per lunghi anni sofferto e che è stata una delle cause principali che hanno determinato negli anni l'erosione delle quote in patria a vantaggio dei giapponesi prima e dei coreani poi e che in ultimo ha determinato la crisi del 2008, di cui imho l'industria finanziaria è stata solo la goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso ma non la causa principale. Senza contare che un ritiro nei comodi, si fa per dire anche qui, confini nazionali sarebbe decisamente mal visto (eufemismo....) dalla platea dei fornitori. Ma poi mi chiedo: è veramente possibile rinunciare ad un'area commerciale (EU occidentale) che se tutto va come deve andare quest'anno supera i 16 mln di esemplari venduti con una chiara ripresa dei prezzi ? Se lo fanno, imho il Maglionato (e VAG e PSA....) se la ridono di gusto.

Modificato 23 Maggio 2017 da pennellotref