Have you read the news today?
Honda just announced a record quarterly profit of $1.7 Billion and Ford announced a record loss of $8.7 Billion ($8,700,000,000). Turmoil in the automotive industry - you bet! Are all of the manufacturers losing money? Apparently not.
Honda is the home to the fuel efficient Accord, Civic and Civic Hybrid. Ford is home to the Expedition and Lincoln Navigator. In Ford's defence, they have been proactively green for a number of years, such as dictating minimum percentages of recycled content in their vehicles from their suppliers. But in reality - how well has that Focus (no pun intended) translated into sales?
I would like to think that the people leading Ford in Detroit should have and would have seen higher gas prices and raised consumer awareness of climate change coming. Why didn't they? Profit margins on SUV's 3 or 4 years ago where high, now they can't give them away. I bet they are thinking that the margin on a hybrid Focus (which doesn't exist yet) would be looking a whole lot healthier now than the margin on an Expedition today.
Who gets hurt in this scenario? Not the consumer - they can go across the street to Honda or Toyota, or even GM (by the way, check out the new fuel efficient Camaro - who'd a thunk it!). My heart goes out to the Ford employees who are losing their jobs. I have visited a few Ford plants - these are people that should still be working today if upper management wasn't asleep at the wheel (ok, another pun).
There is a lesson here for companies in other sectors - please take note. The times they are a changin'...look ahead and figure out what your new 'greener' products and services will look like one year, two years and three years from now. If you don't, your competition will.
Peter Corbyn
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