Ford’s Fields Says U.S. Auto Sales May Decline 9% This Year
By Alex Ortolani and Thomas R. Keene
Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Ford Motor Co. is forecasting that this year’s U.S. sales of cars and light trucks may fall as much as 9 percent from 2008, when they reached a 16-year low.
Industry sales will be 12 million to 12.5 million, with the first half weaker than the final six months, Mark Fields, the Dearborn, Michigan-based company’s president for the Americas, said today in an interview on Bloomberg Radio. The total last year was 13.2 million.
“After the last couple years, we hope we’re at a bottom because it’s a pretty low level of activity for the industry,” he said.
Another industrywide decline would be a challenge for Ford, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, which have been losing sales at a faster rate than their overseas competitors. Sales fell 21 percent last year at Ford, the second-largest U.S. automaker, compared with 18 percent for the industry.
Ford has enough available funding for operations, Fields said. The automaker would need to tap a credit line of as much as $9 billion that it requested from the U.S. government only “in case the economy continues to deteriorate well beyond our assumptions,” he said. |
