DETROIT – Ford Motor is about to tell investors what they’ve long wondered: How much is the transition to electric vehicles costing?
The automaker on Thursday plans to begin reporting its financial results by business unit, instead of by region, ushering in the new reporting structure with a “teach-in” for analysts and media — on the theme of “Ford Refounded” — and releasing revised versions of its financial results that will reveal how the new business units would have performed in 2021 and 2022.
Those new business units include “Ford Blue,” Ford’s traditional internal combustion engine business; its “Model e” electric vehicle unit; the “Ford Pro” commercial and government fleet business; “Ford Next,” which includes nonautomotive mobility solutions and other future tech; and its existing Ford Credit financial services subsidiary.
The changes amount to the most detailed look yet by any legacy automaker into the finances behind the EV business.
The carmaker is expected to release profits and losses, revenue, margins and earnings before interest and taxes, or EBIT, for each of the units – giving investors and analysts a baseline for comparisons as the company’s transformation unfolds.
As part of a sweeping rethink of its business under CEO Jim Farley, Ford decided last year to separate its primary profit engines – internal combustion vehicles and its commercial fleet business – from the company’s emerging all-electric vehicles, which are not expected to be profitable for at least a few years.
Farley and other executives have emphasized that the reporting changes aren’t just about disclosure: The new format reflects the way Ford’s executive team thinks about and runs the business.
“The changes are significant. It’s not the first time Ford Motor Co. has had to reimagine its future or form its own path that’s different from other companies,” Farley said when announcing the new business units on March 2, 2022. “Is this about winning? 100%.”
Wall Street is taking a wait-and-see approach to the changes. Analysts on average maintain a hold rating on the stock with a $13.50 price target, according to ratings compiled by FactSet. The shares traded Wednesday for about $11.70 per share.
Shares of Ford jumped by 8.4% the day executives announced the new businesses, but the stock is down 35% since then, dragged lower by changing market conditions, supply chain issues and underwhelming quarterly earnings.
The company will report its first-quarter results under the new format on May 2 and will host a capital markets day on May 22.
EV losses
Farley argued last year that Ford’s stand-alone EV business will “produce as much excitement as any pure EV competitor, but with scale and resources that no start-up could ever match.”
Still, he described the legacy business as “a profit and cash engine” for the 120-year-old automaker. As with other automakers and EV startups, investors should expect deep losses when it comes to Ford’s electric vehicle business, according to Wall Street analysts.
Model e is expected to include the company’s EV platforms, electronics, batteries, motors, and embedded software and digital experience.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas expects Ford Model e to have negative gross margins of between 10% and 20% with adjusted EBIT margins of between negative 20% and negative 30%. Both would imply significant losses.
Ford has said it expects 8% margins on its EVs — along with 2 million units in annual production of the vehicles — by 2026, helping to boost its overall adjusted profit margins to 10%. The company’s adjusted profit margin last year was 6.6%.
Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner believes Ford could be incurring gross losses of about $9,000 per EV sold. The analyst expects Ford to reveal Thursday Model e operating losses of $6 billion for 2022. That’s after accounting for significant research and development investments — roughly 65% of the company’s total R&D — into the EV unit.
“The EV business could report much deeper losses than investors expect, which could make Ford’s target for 8% EV EBIT margin by 2026 particularly difficult to achieve,” Rosner said Monday in an investor note.
Aside from EV leader Tesla, no major automakers are expected to generate meaningful profits from electric vehicles for at least several years, as the industry works to increase EV output and manufacturing scale. That’s particularly true of EVs like Ford’s, as mass-market vehicles typically generate lower profits than luxury models.
Profit engine
Ford’s current bread and butter is vehicles with internal combustion engines, specifically its F-Series pickups, which have topped U.S. sales charts for more than 40 years.
The large pickups fuel the company’s operations and are expected to for “years to come,” Farley said when announcing the split last year.
Deutsche Bank estimates the Ford Blue traditional business could show an EBIT margin of 7.3% for 2022, more than offsetting last year’s EV losses.
Morgan Stanley’s Jonas said Ford’s new reporting structure should “confirm our view that the ICE business (Ford Blue) is highly cash flow generative and currently funding the capital consuming EV business.”
However, “Investors may question how long this can continue,” he said.
Ford’s plan is to cut at least $3 billion in structural costs largely out of the traditional business by mid-decade to boost margins. Kumar Galhotra, head of Ford Blue, said the company expects to do this by reducing complexity, quality and structural costs over the next two to three years, he said in March 2022.
“Nothing is going to be off the table,” Galhotra said last March. “Our complexity needs to be radically simplified; our warranty costs need to be substantially lower. Our advertising cost needs to be what we do when we invest in our products. Those investments need to be made at world-class efficiency.”
Ford Pro surprise?
The pleasant surprise on Thursday may be the profitability of Ford Pro, the company’s fleet unit. Deutsche Bank estimates that Ford Pro would have been the company’s most profitable automotive unit in 2022, with an EBIT margin of 23.5%.
Ford has long been a significant player in the commercial fleet markets in North America and Europe with its deep expertise in pickups and its huge-selling line of Transit vans. More recently, it has looked to increase the profitability of its fleet operations with software and services that draw on its decades of experience serving fleet operators – and that take advantage of the connectivity and new technologies built into its latest vehicles.
Thanks in part to those new technology-enabled offerings, Ford Pro’s recent profit margins will almost certainly impress. But will they be sustainable? Deutsche Bank’s Rosner, who has a sell rating on Ford’s stock, wrote that he wonders if Ford Pro’s profitability “could come under pressure as the segment ramps up vehicles with expensive electric powertrains.”
Sales of EVs are expected to be a significant part of Ford Pro’s business in the coming years as the company introduces additional electric models tailored for its fleet customers. That will almost certainly hurt Ford Pro’s margins as Ford’s EV production ramps up. (In 2022, the numbers were still small: Only 6,500 of the roughly 105,000 Transit vans that Ford sold in the U.S. last year were EVs.)
Still, Ford Pro CEO Ted Cannis says fleet electrification offers new opportunities for Ford Pro.
“Our commercial customers are confused [about EVs], and they want a lot of help,” Cannis said at an Evercore utilities conference in January. “The key part for us to accelerate the move to electrification is to make it easier.”