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Ford Motor Company (FMC)
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Ford Motor Company (FMC) is an American establishment and the world’s third largest
automaker in terms of vehicle sales. Ford is the third largest automaker in American
automobile industry after General Motors and Toyota. Ford was founded in 1903 by
Henry Ford who was the corporate giant in the American automobile industry during
the twentieth century. He was 40 years old when he founded the Ford Motor Company.
FMC as a conglomerate has diversified its product portfolio into various global
brands. The Fords core and affiliated automotive global brands would include Ford,
Land Rover, Jaguar, Volvo, Mercury, Aston Martin (a portion is sold in March 2007),
Lincoln and Mazda. Ford was able to grow not only on an organic manner but also
in terms of inorganic ways which constitutes many successful mergers and acquisitions
(Takeovers) around the globe. Apart from this, Ford also owns one third of controlling
interest in Mazda in Japan.
The FMC is the pioneer on the assembly line concept which is recognized as a sound
management concept as a means of increasing work floor efficiency. With the highly
efficient workforce, specialization and reducing price levels Henry Ford was able
to introduce a new philosophy of his own to the management literature. This is called
the Fordism introduced in 1914.
Recently FMC has lost its way in automobile industry largely due to the reasons
beyond its control. With the dawn of the twenty first century FMC had to face lot
of obstacles despite being the one of the oldest companies in the industry today.
The company currently faces a huge financial crisis which has raised its debt capacity
for $ 25 billion and would bring the company in to a sorry state. The FMC caters
for a diversified range of automobile which includes cars, tractors, buses and trucks.
This has allowed Ford to collect sales revenue from various sources not only on
its core product (cars) which minimizes the business risk.
The Premier Automotive Group (PAG) is a corporate entity within the FMC that examines
the business operations of its three European luxury, top-end automobile subsidiaries:
Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo. The Jaguar and Land Rover currently up for sale while
the Aston Martin has been sold recently.
The Uk-based luxury carmaker Aston Martin yet again heading back into British hands
after being sold by Ford in a £479m deal in March 2007. The Indian automaker Tata
Motors has approached to buy the Jaguar and Land Rover and emerged as the highest
bidder for the UK-based Premium brands. Ford bought Jaguar for $2.5 billion in 1989
and Land Rover for $2.7 billion in 2000, joining them with Aston Martin and Volvo
to form its Premier Automotive Group. Further Ford has announced its intentions
of selling off its Swedish brand Volvo and has decided to entertain offers for the
safest brand of the automotive industry.
Now Ford has realized idea of collecting European brands now appears to be fruitless
exercise and trying to focus its attention on to its basics of manufacturing cars
and trucks in United States. Ford currently caters for different market segments
which varies from basic to luxury cars while catering in three categories; SUV’s
( Sport Utility Vehicles), Sedan and Coupe. The Ford’s product protfolio would encompass
Falcon, Focus, Ford Escort, Ford Cortina and Ford Taunus just to name a few from
many.
One of the prominent features of Ford is identification of exact customer real life
requirements and strving hard to satisfy the automobile customer. Ford has identified
different goegraphical segments around the world and exactly knows the passion,taste
and the consumer phyche varies from place to place.Therefore Ford offers unique
designs and distinctive styles for each geographical segment which are well received
by the customers around the globe. For instance, more recent favorites like the
Mustang in the United States, the Mondeo in Europe, the EcoSport in South America
and the Territory in Asia, Ford vehicles have been among the world's most popular
cars, trucks and SUVs. |
Ford Focus |
Ford Mondeo |
Ford Ka |
Ford Ranger |
Ford GT |
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