4Th Quarter and Full Year 2007 Ford Motor Company Earnings Results Conference Call
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FINAL TRANSCRIPT F - 4th Quarter and Full Year 2007 Ford Motor Company Earnings Results Conference Call Event Date/Time: Jan. 24. 2008 / 9:00AM ET www.streetevents.com Contact Us © 2008 Thomson Financial. Republished with permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Thomson Financial. FINAL TRANSCRIPT Jan. 24. 2008 / 9:00AM, F - 4th Quarter and Full Year 2007 Ford Motor Company Earnings Results Conference Call CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Lillian Etzkorn Ford Motor Company - Director, IR Alan Mulally Ford Motor Company - President & CEO Don Leclair Ford Motor Company - CFO CONFERENCE CALL PARTICIPANTS Chris Ceraso Credit Suisse - Analyst Robert Barry Goldman Sachs - Analyst Rod Lache Deutsche Bank - Analyst Himanshu Patel JPMorgan - Analyst Brian Johnson Lehman Brothers - Analyst Colin Langan UBS - Analyst Peter Nesvold Bear Stearns - Analyst John Murphy Merrill Lynch - Analyst Bryce Hoffman Detroit News - Media Jeff Bennett Dow Jones - Media Tom Kirsher Associated Press - Media Bernard Simon Financial Times - Media Mike Specter Wall Street Journal - Media Amy Wilson Automotive News - Media Sarah Webster Detroit Free Press - Media Bill Koenig Bloomberg News - Media PRESENTATION www.streetevents.com Contact Us 1 © 2008 Thomson Financial. Republished with permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Thomson Financial. FINAL TRANSCRIPT Jan. 24. 2008 / 9:00AM, F - 4th Quarter and Full Year 2007 Ford Motor Company Earnings Results Conference Call Operator Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Ford Motor Company fourth-quarter earnings conference call. My name is Michelle and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will be facilitating a question-and-answer session towards the end of this conference. (OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS). As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. And I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host, Ms. Lillian Etzkorn, Director of Investor Relations. Please proceed. Lillian Etzkorn - Ford Motor Company - Director, IR Thank you, Michelle and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to all of you who are joining us either by phone or webcast. On behalf of the entire Ford management team, I would like to thank you for spending time with us this morning. With me this morning are Alan Mulally, President and CEO and Don Leclair, Chief Financial Officer. Also in the room are Peter Daniel, Senior Vice President and Controller; Neil Schloss, Vice President and Treasurer; Mark Kosman, Director of Accounting and K.R. Kent, Ford Credit©s CFO. Before we begin, I would like to review a couple of quick items. A copy of this morning©s earnings release and the slides that we will be using today have been posted on Ford©s investor and media websites for your reference. The financial results discussed herein are presented on a preliminary basis. Final data will be included in our Form 10-K for the year 2007. Additionally, the financial results presented here are on a GAAP basis and in some cases, on a non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP financial measures discussed in this call are reconciled to their GAAP equivalent as part of the appendix to the slide deck. Finally, today©s presentation includes some forward-looking statements about our expectations for Ford©s future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments here. Additional information about the factors that could affect future results are summarized at the end of this presentation. These risk factors are also detailed in our SEC filings, including our annual, quarterly and current reports to the SEC. With that, I would like to turn the presentation over to Alan Mulally, Ford©s President and CEO. Alan Mulally - Ford Motor Company - President & CEO Thanks, Lillian and good morning to everyone. We will begin by reviewing the key financial results for the fourth quarter and the full year. Don will take us through the details and provide our planning assumptions for 2008, then I will come back and wrap up before we take your questions. As shown at the top of the slide, on slide 2, vehicle wholesales last quarter were over 1.6 million units, up 75,000 from the same period in 2006. Total company revenue of $45.5 billion was up about 13% from a year ago. The increase primarily reflects favorable exchange and net pricing, as well as higher volume. Pretax results from continuing operations were a loss of $620 million, an improvement of $1.3 billion from the same period in 2006. This includes a more than $1.4 billion improvement in automotive operating profits, partially offset by lower profits at Financial Services. Our fourth-quarter net loss was $2.8 billion. This included $30.9 billion of pretax special charges. Don will take you through these largely non-cash charges shortly. We ended the quarter with $34.6 billion of gross cash, an increase of $700 million from 2006. www.streetevents.com Contact Us 2 © 2008 Thomson Financial. Republished with permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Thomson Financial. FINAL TRANSCRIPT Jan. 24. 2008 / 9:00AM, F - 4th Quarter and Full Year 2007 Ford Motor Company Earnings Results Conference Call Overall, as we have said before, our plan is working and we continue to show progress. For the full year, we had a pretax profit of $126 million from continuing operations, an improvement of about $3.3 billion from 2006. Our net loss was $2.7 billion, an improvement of nearly $10 billion compared with 2006. Turning to slide 3, we have continued to make real progress on our plan. We took restructuring actions in order to operate profitably. We reduced North American personnel by 32,800 during 2007 and reached a historic four-year agreement with the UAW. We also achieved $1.8 billion of cost reductions last year. We continued to accelerate development of new products our customers want and value. We will discuss our 2007 product highlights in more detail in a minute. We worked to finance our plan and improve our balance sheet. We completed several debt equity exchanges. We sold Aston Martin and other non-core assets and are working toward completing the sale of Jaguar/Land Rover. And it is important to recognize that as we accomplished all of these actions, we continued to improve quality, made great progress in working together effectively as one team across the globe, leveraging our global assets. Our full-year results indicate that we are headed in the right direction. In North America, results improved $2.5 billion compared with a year ago. Ford South America, Ford Europe, PAG, Ford Asia-Pacific and Africa and Mazda all were profitable for the full year and all reported significant improvements compared with the same period a year ago. Ford Credit continues to be profitable; although its results were lower than a year ago, it continues to perform in line with our expectations. Turning to slide 4, as I mentioned earlier, we remain committed to new products our customers want and value. In 2007, we had some great launches, including the European Ford Focus, the Mondeo and the C-MAX in addition to the North American F-Series Super Duty, Escape and Focus. Just last week, the Mazda CX-9 won the 2008 North America Truck of the Year award at the Detroit Auto Show, which is really special. Another boost to our lineup in 2007 was Ford SYNC, our in-car connectivity system we developed jointly with Microsoft. We are also excited about the two all-new vehicles coming this year -- the Ford Flex, an innovative crossover, and the Lincoln MKS, the flagship of our Lincoln brand. That is in addition to the new Ford F-150, which comes in the second half of this year also. In South America, Ford retail sales were up 19%. In Europe, retail sales were up more than 5% year-over-year. In Asia-Pacific and Africa and Mazda, full-year Ford China retail sales were up 26% year-over-year, outpacing the industry. We also opened an engine assembly plant in China, which will allow us to grow even more this year in China. Turning to slide 5, we are equally excited about Ford©s progress in quality, safety and environmental innovation. In quality, we had five segment winners in the JD Power and Associates© Initial Quality Survey, more than any other manufacturer. Our survey indicated that Ford©s quality improved at the rate of 11% in 2007, more than five times better than the industry average of 2%. Turning to safety, this year, Ford earned more top safety pick ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety than any other manufacturer. Ford has more NHTSA five-star safety rated vehicles than any other automaker and in Europe, Ford has the most vehicles on the euro NCAP©s top 10 list for adult occupant protection. We continue to move ahead in environmental innovation as well. We announced a new engine family called EcoBoost, which will deliver up to 20% better fuel economy and a reduction of CO2 by 15% and we plan to install this new technology in half a million vehicles annually in North America within the next five years. In addition to the improved fuel economy, EcoBoost improves driving performance as well. EcoBoost will debut in the Lincoln MKS next year. And our partnership with Southern California Edison will advance the commercialization of plug-in hybrid vehicles.