Ford Motor Company Q3 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-11-03 03:15:16.0

Tags: Platform, C, Call Transcript, Earnings, Ford Motor Co., C/C++, Programming Languages, Manufacturing, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of John Murphy representing Banc of America. Please proceed.

John Murphy Banc of America

Good morning guys.

Alan Mulally

Hi John.

John Murphy Banc of America

Just a question around the common architectures that you are ramping up on, you gave an interesting metric on the C platform, and getting 2 million off of that by 2012, I was just wondering if you could give us any broader metrics on that progress by 2012, and just give us an idea where you stand right now on those common architectures?

Alan Mulally

You bet. As you pointed out, we are really making tremendous progress on that, and it really has accelerated with the acceleration of the new vehicles, especially the B, and the C, the CD platform. On the B platform, a little bit more granularity, we think that over the next couple of years, we will be over a million units on that platform, and on the C platform, we think we could be in excess of 2 million units. And kind of overall, John, what we are looking at now across our entire product line is that nearly 80% to 85% over this next two or three years will be on these common platforms worldwide. So, we are really pleased with the acceleration of that project going of course along with that as we noted today, we are starting to see tremendous improvement in the engineering and manufacturing efficiencies as we move to those global platforms.

John Murphy Banc of America

Okay, and then secondly, if we just think about structural costs, you have said you gone through $4.6 billion in cuts year-to-date, $5 billion is the target, what’s the base that you are on right now? And as we step forward in volumes to recover 2010 and 2011, I know it’s an open question as to how much they actually recover, but how should we think about operating leverage here, simply put where is your cap utilization rate now and where do you think it gets in the next few years as well?

Lewis Booth

We are not going to give out specifics of our cost base. In terms of as we go forward, our capacity utilization is going to increase, it’s about something like 75% to 80% depending on the region, and we will see that going up for a couple of reasons, One, as demand grows going forward and secondly, we still have some assembly capacity to take to some of our models we extended their lifetime.

 

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