Ford Sales Down, But It’s Not a Big Deal…For Now
On July 1st, Ford Motor Company released information on their sales to date and it has made a down-turn from last year. However, it’s coming as no surprise and Ford’s Sales Analyst, Erich Merkle says it was expected.
Here are some notes from Ford’s June 2014 announcement. Ford sold 222,064 vehicles in June of 2014 and, when compared to June 2013, it was a six-percent loss.
However, when they split retail versus fleet Sales, retail was only a five-percent loss while fleet was down seven-percent. Why such a loss? You can put some of the blame on the new F-Series.
With the introduction of the new Ford F-Series, both the light-duty and medium-duty, Ford is beginning an inventory reduction. This is to help Ford, their salespeople, and their dealers to prepare for the new models.
Erich Merkle explains, “It didn’t come as a surprise, simply because when you start taking a look at what we’re having to do with F-Series, we’re having to manage our inventory today, so we have to maximize our production output and grow our inventory volume, so we’re pulling back on some of our F-Series spend, which creates a lower number. F-Series was down about 11%, but that is by design so that we can allow our inventories to actually increase between now and the fall as we go into the change over and we take down our plants for the change over to the all-new F-150.”
Merkle continues, “We have to make sure that we have higher levels of inventory as we go into the change-over. So, F-Series along with a pull-back in our daily rental volumes is going to place a little bit of weight on our sales as we go through the remainder of this year.”
In other words, expect more losses until the new F-Series starts rolling out. The Transit Connect, though, was a clear winner for Ford in June. Transit Connect fleet sales were up 30-percent and retail sales were up 55-percent.
Erich Merkle states, “We’re starting to see more and more of these vehicles get into the hands of consumers, we’re finding that consumers really like the Transit Connect Wagon.”
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