Ford announced that the company missed expectations and that sales plunged due to chip shortages. F-150 sales were part of the decline.

This is affecting the entire industry and spurring a rush to buy used cars.

There are several disturbing trends for the automakers. One, car sales in general are slipping after years of sustained growth for the industry. Also, sales of trucks (including SUVs and CUVs) are doing fine, while sales of traditional passengers cars are plummeting.

This trend is highlighted by Ford’s dismal sales results for April 2017 where US sales plunged 7.2%. This shows overall weakness in the market along with the troubling trend for cars versus trucks.

Carmakers have had a great run, but now we’ll see how they react to a market slowdown.

Things change fast in the U.S. Auto Industry as it looks like it’s now Chrysler, Hyundai-Kia , Toyota and VW’s time to shine in 2012. GM and Ford are down in share for the year but they both have some strong product coming out that could put them back in the black when it comes to market share.

From the Detroit News:

General Motors Co.’s sales in the U.S. were down 8.2 percent for April as Ford Motor Co. reported last month’s U.S. sales were down, too, by 5 percent. Meanwhile, Chrysler Group LLC said Tuesday its sales were up 20 percent last month, making for its best April in four years.

GM sales were down to 213,387 primarily due to a 25 percent drop in fleet sales that the automaker said was because of the timing of rental customer deliveries. The company said its retail sales were essentially flat. GM also pointed out that April 2012 had three fewer selling days than the same month a year ago — only the second time that has occurred in the past 10 years.

GMC posted a sales increase of 4.5 percent during the month, driven by a 20 percent increase in sales of the GMC Sierra pickup and a 9 percent jump for the GMC Terrain crossover. Chevrolet, Buick and Cadillac all saw total sales fall during April compared to the same month a year earlier.

Read the full article.

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.