Ford Motor Co.’s U.S. sales rose 9 percent in September, to 175,199 vehicles, led by pickup and crossover sales. Ford’s performance light-vehicle sales gain 10 percent. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Ford’s total sales were hurt by a car-sales decline of 9 percent to 49,876 in part because of low inventory of the Ford Focus.
Ford leaders vowed to correct the shortfall.
“Our car sales have been strong, but as we’ve loaded up the shelves on Focus in particular, they haven’t been where we wanted,” Ken Czubay, Ford’s vice president of U.S. marketing, sales and service, said during a conference call. “I am very confident in October we’ll have a strong across-the-board Focus, Fiesta and Fusion month.”
Restocking
Sales of Ford’s redesigned Focus tumbled 24 percent to 10,309 last month.
Similarly, sales of the Taurus sedan fell 38 percent to 4,305 and sales of the Edge crossover dipped 9 percent to 11,680.
Ford struggled to meet Focus demand last month despite running its Focus production facility in Wayne, Mich., “full out,” Czubay said.
Many Ford dealers have complained that a lack of Focus inventory has hurt their sales. One Midwest dealer, who asked not to be named, said he has two Focus cars in stock — less than a 30-day supply for him.
“We’re trying to sell out of an empty wagon,” the dealer said. “If we had more, we could sell more, but we’ve never had any inventory on them.”
AN
Fortunately, this is a case of degrees of good news.
Ford’s growth continues to be in its most profitable segments and any business it has left on the table has been the result of capacity or supplier constraints (that are now being remedied) or deliberate volume discipline for continues to exercise in pursuit of days’ supply equilibrium that not only keep the size of incentives in-check, but limit the total number of incentives that will have to come-off the books in subsequent quarters.