Ford Motor Co. recorded strong earnings for 2011 but the market didn’t flinch and the stock price sunk? Is there something we don’t know because with great management and strong products isn’t Ford on the right track? Here is a good article that digs a bit deeper than most reporting on Ford’s future.

From TheDetroitBureau.com:

Sometimes it can be difficult to please Wall Street. As trading for the week neared its close the automaker’s shares were on track to drop about a half dollar as trader’s lamented the sort of figures that they might have only fantasized about during the depths of the Great Recession. The maker reported a full-year pre-tax operating profit of $8.8 billion, or $1.51 a share, an increase of $463 million over 2010.

But what didn’t sit so well is that Ford still fell about a nickel a share short of early estimates, and more worrisome, total automotive pre-tax operating profits for the fourth quarter dipped to $586 million, a decrease of $155 million from the fourth quarter of 2010.

Read the full article.

From AutoNews.com:

DETROIT (Bloomberg) — Ford Motor Co. said growth in Asia and increasing demand for small cars will boost global sales 50 percent to 8 million vehicles annually by 2015 as the automaker switches gears from restructuring to expansion.

“Growth is a new skill to learn for us,” Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth said today in an interview in New York. “We’ve been good at restructuring businesses over the last decade. Growth takes practice.”

CEO Alan Mulally told investors today that the automaker expects that by 2020, 55 percent of vehicle sales will be small cars and a third of sales will be in Asia, Booth said.

“Fifty percent is a large number,” Mulally said of the growth target on Bloomberg Television today. “But it’s off a tremendous foundation we have laid to support that.”

Ford executives, on a tour of Wall Street today, also said:

• Total Automotive debt will be reduced to about $10 billion by 2015, down from $16.6 billion at March 31, 2011 and from $33.6 billion at the end of 2009.

Read the full article.

From the Detroit Free Press:

Ford earned $2.6 billion in the first three months of 2011, a 22.4% improvement over a year earlier, as U.S. sales increased on the strength of small and midsize cars and cost-cutting in Europe resulted in a modest operating profit.

The Dearborn automaker’s net income of 61 cents per share beat the 50 cents per share consensus forecast of about 20 Wall Street analysts and marked Ford’s most profitable first-quarter in 13 years. In 2010′s first quarter Ford made $2.1 billion, or 46 cents per share.

Revenue increased 18% to $33.1 billion from $28.1 billion a year earlier.

“Our team delivered a great quarter, with solid growth and improvements in all regions,” said Alan Mulally, Ford president and CEO.

Read the full article.

Let the good times roll at Ford Motor! It’s amazing how this company turned around in the four years since CEO Alan Mulally took over the top spot from Bill Ford. It won’t be easy to keep the market share gains Ford has seen in the past few years with GM and Chrysler experiencing their own comebacks. In the meantime you know the Blue Oval Crew isn’t sitting back but rather they are getting ready for another round of new product launches in 2011.

From the Detroit Free Press:

Ford is about to happily wave good-bye to 10 years of turnaround plans.

The Dearborn automaker, which plans to announce year-end financial results Friday, is poised to report a profit for 2010 of about $8 billion excluding onetime charges — the automaker’s biggest annual profit in a decade.

Ford usually announces how much annual profit-sharing checks will be that day. The checks, expected in March, could give the local economy a $240-million boost, said David Sowerby, economist and chief portfolio manager for Loomis Sayles. Bernie Ricke, president of UAW Local 600, said the checks will be “fairly significant and more than we’ve seen in several years.”

Read the full article.

The automotive landscape has been changing so rapidly it’s sometimes hard to keep up. GM and Chrysler had to be saved by the federal government, while Ford was able to avoid that fate. Their troubles have probably helped Ford, but Ford has also been on a tear with impressive new models like the Ford Fusion, and many more new models are in the pipeline.

Auto analysts expected Ford to show some improvement, but the announced numbers were a pleasant surprise for many.

Ford Motor Co. posted a surprise profit of $2.3 billion for the second quarter — a sharp contrast to the whopping $8.7 billion loss it reported for the same period a year ago — but the profit was largely due to one-time gains related to its debt reduction moves.

Even with those special items removed, the Dearborn automaker surprised Wall Street with a pre-tax operating loss of $424 million for the second quarter of 2009, excluding special items — a $609 million improvement compared with the second quarter of 2008.

After taxes and excluding special items, Ford posted an operating loss of $638 million in the second quarter, or 21 cents per share, compared with a loss of $1.4 billion, 63 cents per share a year ago. That also was a marked improvement over the $1.4 billion loss — $1.8 billion after taxes and excluding special items — that Ford reported for the first three months of the year, when it lost 75 cents per share.

Wall Street had been anticipating a loss of 52 cents per share, after taxes and excluding special items, according to a survey of a dozen analysts by Thomson Reuters prior to today’s announcement.

“While the business environment remained extremely challenging around the world, we made significant progress on our transformation plan,” said CEO Alan Mulally. “Our underlying business is growing progressively stronger as we introduce great new products that customers want and value, while continuing to aggressively restructure our business and strengthen our balance sheet.”

It looks like Alan Mulally’s turnaround efforts are on track.