Mark Fields is Out at Ford

Mark Fields has been fired as CEO of Ford. That’s a tough break for him and I feel bad. The company is making a decent profit but the stock has gone nowhere.

Last year, I finally decided to ditch Ford from our Buy List after holding on for too long.

During Mr. Fields’s three-year tenure — a period when Ford’s shares dropped 40 percent — he came under fire from investors and Ford’s board for failing to expand the company’s core auto business and for lagging in developing the high-tech cars of the future.

The change came less than two weeks after Mr. Fields was sharply criticized during the company’s annual shareholders meeting for Ford’s deteriorating financial results.

(…)

As recently as last week, Mr. Fields, 56, had been trying to strengthen Ford’s bottom line by cutting 1,400 salaried jobs. But, unable to reverse the stock decline, he ran out of time to carry out his strategy to slash costs and expand Ford’s lineup of trucks and sport utility vehicles, while also investing in autonomous and electrified vehicles.

Despite spending heavily on self-driving research, Ford was struggling to keep pace with larger automakers such as General Motors and tech giants like Google, both of which have been testing self-driving vehicles. Ford is promising to have a fully autonomous vehicle on the road by 2021.

I think this is a good example of a CEO getting blamed for things that weren’t entirely his fault. The new CEO is Jim Hackett. He was in charge of Ford’s efforts in autonomous vehicles.

The shares are back up over $11. At last week’s low, Ford was yielding 5.6%.

Posted by on May 22nd, 2017 at 9:48 am


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