Ford Motor Company posts a profit

Based on a lot of figures that I have no hope of understanding, the Ford Motor Company has posted a profit for 2009 of $454 million after the fourth quarter produced a net income of $868 million. This comes after about four years of losing money by the bucket loads, the last time Ford actually made a full year profit was 2005. What impresses me then about this is that Ford has been bleeding since before the the full out recession hit, so to then turn it around with the recession still lurking about it is quite an achievement. Sure they did get quite a bit of help but they still could have squandered that.

How they pulled of this feat of financial wizardry had a lot to do with restructuring and cost cutting. Structural costs were cut by $5.1 billion from the previous year, which means they must’ve wielded a very large axe considering the target was $4 billion. With this massive cost reduction, their 2009 revenue of $118.3 billion proved enough for a profit despite that being a revenue drop of $19.8 billion.

With these being the first positive results in some time, Ford seem to be looking to the future with renewed vigour. They intend to boost production in North America by 20,000 units up to 570,000. All I say about that is that I hope many of them are of the Focus RS variety and headed our way to South Africa.

Ford's are built tough, now they're building more of them as well

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