Ford Motor Earnings Call Nuggets: Europe and the Fourth Quarter Outlook

On Tuesday, Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F) reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

Europe

Chris Ceraso – Credit Suisse: Maybe on Europe you mentioned that you were going to be doing some destocking in Q4, can you give us an idea where inventory stand today either in terms of the number of the units or day supply and where you are targeting that to be? Is this something that you feel like you can get done in Q4 or is the destock going to carry into Q1 of next year?

Alan Mulally – President and CEO: Bob?

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Robert L. Shanks – EVP & CFO: Yeah. Actually the inventory has been managed very, very effectively by the Ford Europe team throughout the entire downturn. So we go into — we came into the quarter with a very healthy levels of day supply and in fact we ended day supply in the quarter at let’s see it was about 39 day supply. We would normally run the business at about 50, but in the third quarter it always went down because of the summer plant shutdowns. Somehow what we would normally do Chris is we would build the stock back up in the fourth quarter, back up to about 50 day supply or so. We are not going to do that. We’re going to effectively pass on that and leave the day supply at about 40 or so and that’s what we would like to target on a go forward basis because we think there are benefits as we mentioned in the comments to everyone involved. So, as a result of that we’ll take a hit in the fourth order probably to the tune of around $300 million because we do that, but we think it puts the business in a much, much healthier position going forward and so that’s what we’ll do.

Chris Ceraso – Credit Suisse: That makes sense. Then the $450 million to $500 million that you anticipate from savings of the restructuring there, when does that kick in is that second half ’13 or not until ’14 or when does that start?

Alan Mulally – President and CEO: Well obviously it’s associated with the facility reduction and the way that’s going to work is the U.K. facilities are projected to close around the middle of 2013 and those were the smaller of the three facilities that we talked about closing. Genk, which is the larger one won’t close until the latter part of 2014. So, you’ll see not that much in 2013 and frankly little bit more in ’14 as you get the full year effect of the U.K. actions, but then Genk doesn’t occurrence start to generate the associated savings until the latter part of ’14.

Chris Ceraso – Credit Suisse: Then on the accelerated depreciation is that something that will run through normal course of results or you’re going to call that out as a special item?

Alan Mulally – President and CEO: Now that will go through operating results as they same way that we’ve handled the same types of financial effects in North America. The only thing at the moment that we’ve identified that would go through special items would be the costs associated with the separations.

Fourth Quarter Outlook

Itay Michaeli – Citi: So, I just wanted to talk on the fourth quarter outlook. Given the wide range of losses potentially in Europe, are you expecting North America to be lower sequentially? It looks like – Q3 kind of broke the seasonal trend and was higher sequentially. If we can get a better sense of the walk given that you do have some tailwinds from products and pricing but also the typical seasonal behavior with some of the inventory actions in December, just wanted to get a better sense of the North America walk?

Robert L. Shanks – EVP & CFO: Well we expect in the fourth quarter Itay, that we’ll have a lower Company result, which is not unusual because we always have as you mentioned that seasonal cost increase going from Q3 to Q4 and then on top of that, as we were just discussing with Chris, we’ll have the effects in Europe, so we would expect to have a somewhat higher loss there as well. So, I think you’ll see those normal factors kick in and we’ll have a good quarter. It just won’t be as strong as the current quarter.

Itay Michaeli – Citi: Is that sequentially lower outlook also applicable to North America or is it possible that Europe can really account for most of it? Just given that the guidance for the full year is a European loss of above 1.5 billion which I guess could mean, maybe up to 2 billion, but I just want to get a sense of what you’re expecting specifically for North America directionally…

Robert L. Shanks – EVP & CFO: At the moment, we would expect North America to be down, largely driven by the seasonal cost changes.

Itay Michaeli – Citi: Then just as a follow-up, on the mid-decade outlook in Europe, you did mention that you expect market share to be a little bit higher, I was hoping you can quantify that a bit and then also if you can maybe talk about what you’re expecting, the European contribution margin to look like by mid-decade relative to perhaps 2006, 2007 just wondering historical comparison of what the mid-decade contribution margin that you are expecting in the plan looks like relative to years passed?

Robert L. Shanks – EVP & CFO: Just a couple of comments there. One is we do expect the share to grow, in fact this is the growth plan for Europe not only because we expect the industry to comeback, but we expect to grow our share. In addition as you know our shares in 19 markets that we traditionally track as Europe, but we’ve got very aggressive plans in Eastern Europe and Russia as well and those are actually quite robust growth markets in a region. So, that will be a good story going forward. But in terms of share, we expect the share to grow largely driven by all the products that we talked about last week, but in particular the commercial vehicles. We’re dramatically expanding the commercial lineup, introducing the people carriers in addition to the normal commercial vehicles and in addition what we’re doing is we’re focusing much more on sort of the retail and the commercial fleet channels at the expense of the lower margin, rental and demo sale channels that we actually saw some progress on in the third quarter. So, that will be kind of what’s taking place in terms of share and we’ll grow and we expect the mix of the share to change which actually leads to the other point that you made around the margin. We do expect the margin to improve as we move towards mid-decade that will be because of the change in focus in terms of the business channel mix, but also the product mix should improve, commercial vehicles are quite profitable for us. We also talked about a number of I guess I’ll call them higher revenue, higher margin products that we’ll also be bringing in that should strengthen the brand. In addition to that what we would expect to happen is that the overall industry as the industry comes back a bit from the very low levels that we’re at, I mean somewhat modestly I could admit but we would expect that the discounting would peel back a little bit from where it is today and all of that will generate a higher contribution margin.

Itay Michaeli – Citi: Then just lastly back to North America just a question on the sustainability of margins the next maybe the 12 to 18 months you have some great product launches coming, commodity costs appear to have eased and housing recovery can certainly help your pickup truck mix. So, assuming consumers continue to respond well to your product is there anything that’s occurring this year on the margin side that makes the non-recurring or more difficult to continue under those instructions in the next 12 to 18 months?

Alan Mulally – President and CEO: Well, I think that’s a very good point that you just made. I think it’s important not only to look at pretty spectacular results of North American in the quarter, but to put it in the context of what they’ve done over the last three quarters. So, they’ve been incredibly consistent in generating a profit of over $2 billion in the last reporters three quarters and an operating margin in excess of 10% which as you know is extremely strong. As we go forward, we do expect North America to generate very, very healthy margins going into next year and beyond, but obviously it always depends on the business environment and competitive activity. But I think the business is in a good position and we’ll do quite well in the future. But I wouldn’t get into any specific numbers at this point in time.

A Closer Look: Ford Motor Earnings Cheat Sheet>>