Struggling Automaker Ford Sees Stock Price Fall More Than 11 Percent on Restructuring Plan
DETROIT (AP) -- When General Motors Corp. announced a radical plan to cut its huge unionized work force with early retirement and buyout offers last March, its stock went up 1 cent.
Ford Motor Co. unveiled a restructuring plan Friday that was even more drastic than GM's, but Wall Street snubbed the struggling automaker with criticism and an 11.8 percent decline, or $1.07, in its stock price.
Analysts, for the most part, were disappointed with the plan, which aims to cut $5 billion in costs by the end of 2008 by slashing 10,000 white-collar workers and offering buyouts to all 75,000 unionized employees.
The plan eliminated the company's quarterly dividend of 5 cents per share, and Ford executives said it wouldn't make a profit until sometime in 2009. The executives wouldn't talk about how much the company expects to lose until then.
Burnham Securities analyst David Healy said "it's basically impossible" for Ford to please investors with its restructuring. "I think they scared them a little bit with the postponing of the profitability and the vagueness about the loss."
Ford's cuts weren't deep enough for Merrill Lynch analyst John Murphy. He downgraded the stock from neutral to sell before shares closed Friday at $8.02 on the New York Stock Exchange. His note to investors had the headline: "Ford Motor Co.: Great expectations not met."
Other analysts questioned whether Ford could find its way out of the auto market's shift from trucks and sport utility vehicles to cars quickly enough. They wondered if the company could maintain its dwindling market share and generate enough cash long enough to let the plan work.
They also questioned why the sale of money-losing Jaguar and part of the profitable Ford Motor Credit Co. weren't part of the restructuring, and some questioned the vagueness of Ford's plan to roll out new products.
"We remain skeptical about what this smaller, more profitable Ford may look like, and whether it makes sense to invest in it now," Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Barry said in a research note.
Ford spokeswoman Becky Sanch discounted the reaction.
"I think the announcements and the plans that our senior management announced yesterday are appropriate to address the challenges that we are facing at this point in time," she said.
Healy said a lack of specificity in Ford's product announcements and sale of assets probably occurred because new Chief Executive Alan Mulally has been on the job for just a little more than a week.
"When you have a new management team in there for about a week and a half, it's a little hard to roll out new products," he said.
David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, said many features of the Ford plan had been released prior to the official announcement, diluting its impact on investors.
