Bob Shanks
Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead
Thanks Mark. What I'd like to do is to start on Slide 5, which is our key financial summary. And the first thing I would ask you to do is just glance down the second and the fourth columns. Those are the year-over-years for the fourth quarter and the full year and what you'll see is everything is positive. So whether it's the growth factor, it's the operating results or the net income factors, cash liquidity, everything better than in 2015, whether the quarter or the full year. Now certainly we should recognize that, and we’ll talk about it later in the presentation that we’re seeing strong improvement from across most parts of the business, in fact all parts of the business in terms of the full year and we should recognize too that we’re benefitting from the big bet that we made on the F-150. We had the launch effects of that in 2014 and including in the fourth quarter and that was a big bet for the company and it's paying off for us. It’s certainly resonating with customers. It’s good for the environment and certainly as I said we’re reaping the rewards of that. Since I’m going to touch on most of these things in the subsequent comments and slides, I just want to highlight three things that I won't come back to later. The first down the page under operating results, let’s look at our earnings per share and operating basis, you can see that we came in at $0.58, which is up 93% from a year ago and $1.93 which is up 44%. Go down a bit further and look at the after-tax results, net income you can see we came in at the quarter at $1.9 billion that was up very sharply from a year ago and $7.4 billion for the full year up $6.1 billion. If you go up just a couple lines from there you can see the special items pre-tax charges in the quarter, we have $714 million that was almost completely explained by the re-measurement losses on our pension and OPEB plans. Okay, let’s go on to Slide 6, I’ve got three slides for the full year I’d like to touch on those first and then we’ll get into more details of the quarter. These are the absolutes of the quarter and you can see the record of $10.8 million and then as you glance across the segments, you can see everything that’s profitable in terms of the business units with the exception of South America. And if you look at the operations outside of North America collectively we made $223 million. To me the big story and one of the big stories that we want to get across today is the quality of the improvement across the business on a year-over-year basis. If you look below the charge you can see the changes. The $3.57 billion improvement at the company level, it was driven by North America $1.9 billion of financial services, a contributor over $200 million but we got $1.4 billion of improvement from the operations outside North America and going forward our whole strategy is to keep North America strong, strengthen it to the extent that we can. But it’s really the other operations we need to get them moving forward in a positive direction both in terms of profitability and returns that’s the big opportunity for us as well as the new opportunities and you can see we made great progress on that in the full year and I’ll touch on that in the quarter as well. Let’s turn now to Slide 7 and here we'll look at the key metrics for the company. This is the automotive sector for the full year. So just kind of looking across the page; wholesale is up 5%, revenue up 4%, 9% at constant exchange, very strong improvement in the operating margin 6.8% and the pre-tax results up 60%. And on the lower left, you can see the global market share which is up two tenths that was in South America and Europe and some favorable geographic mix effects as well. Let’s go on to Slide 8 and here we will look at the full year improvement. You can see $3.3 billion that was driven by $7.4 billion of improvement and market factors, volume, mix, net pricing all driving that in the positive direction. We did have cost increases, both contribution cost and structural cost. The one thing I’d like to highlight here we’ve broken out for the first time manufacturing and engineering separately and you can see with the manufacturing call out, that we’ve also indicated that it includes volume related effects. Some companies include variable and labor and overhead in volume, but we don’t do that. We put all that in structural cost, which is why we don’t call it fixed cost because we recognize that the downturn we’re able to respond appropriately whether it’s taking over time out, shifts, lines to be changed and so forth. And so hopefully that will help to understand better the cost and the nature of the cost that we're investing in the business. On the far right, you can see the ratification bonus related to the UAW agreement. I should note that within the results and all this sits in North America, we’ve got about $600 million of cost increases associated with the agreement. Most of that is the one-time ratification bonus. The rest of it is just normal cost increases related to wage increases and so forth and that’s sitting in our structural cost. All right. Now let’s move into the fourth quarter. I will start by looking at the absolutes on Slide 9, again very strong performance $2.6 billion and again glance across the page and you can see everything profitable with the exception of South America and again the collected results of the operations outside North America of profit of nearly $300 million. Again I want to highlight the story year-over-year, go below the chart first line, $1.3 billion, $400 million from North America about a $130 million from financial services, but more than 50% or $760 million coming from the operations outside of North America, again demonstrating the progress that we‘re making in getting the company more balanced in terms of the contributions around the world. Now let’s move to the key metrics on Slide 10, again growth in wholesale is double digits, same thing in revenue of 18% a constant exchange, a good margin for the fourth quarter of 6.1% and pretax results have more than doubled and on the lower left, you can see our global market share was flat. Let’s go on to Slide 11, and here we'll look at the change in our automotive sector results year-over-year up $1.1 billion. Very similar pattern to what we saw in the full year, very strong market factors. We had cost increases again look at the structural cost, you can see the manufacturing of 23.5. Almost all of that is volume related. The balance is explained by the UAW contract and then the gratification bonus to the far right. Okay. Let's go on to North America and here we'll start going through the business units. These are the key metrics. North America had very strong growth in the quarter. It was their best quarter of growth of the year. You can see wholesale is up 15%, revenue up probably nearly 20%. The operating margin very, very good at 8.2% traditionally for the fourth quarter is our weakest quarter and this includes the full $600 million of UAW related cost. So really strong result from North America and you can see the profits of $2.1 -- or $2 billion of 26%. You go below the chart you can see the full year, very strong factors right across the Board and again the margin came in at 10.2%. As we look at the guidance for the year we expect to sustain this level of benchmark profitability with margins about around where we actually ended up about 9.5% or higher. But I thought I would comment on this because it was certainly something that was discussed quite a bit at the Deutsche Bank conference earlier in the month when we provided our guidance. Let me just again put into context how we're seeing the North American business. It is performing and has been performing for years at benchmark levels of profitability and margins and then as we've mentioned in three of the last four years other than the year when we launched that F-150, its been operating at 10% or higher, which actually is at the high end of the range that we're targeting on an ongoing basis of 8% to 10%. Then in 2016 we expect the margins again to be in this range 9% or higher but unlike in 2015 when the year-over-year growth in the market factors far exceeded the cost increases, we expect to see a smaller improvement in the market factors while we'll continue to invest for profitable growth and this is reflecting mainly three factors. The first is the fact that we will see much less benefit in '16 from industry growth in the U.S. The second one is that we are expecting impact of the super duty launch, which takes place in the second half to have an impact. Now we've target a normal launch, but it’s still going to incur cost associated with such a large launch and we're going to have the normal volume ramp up curve that we have to climb. So it will have an effect primarily in the third quarter. And as mentioned lastly, we're continuing to invest for profitable growth this year and beyond not only in the traditional business, the core business, but also as we transformed Ford into an auto and a mobility company. So that’s how we see it. We're very pleased with the results. We think we’re going to sustain this level of profitability as we move into 2016. Okay let's go to the following slide on Slide 13 and let’s look at what happened in the quarter for North America, an improvement of $400 million strong market factors. Cost increasing related to the products which also drove the market factors, but also the structural cost, which were largely volume related and the UAW agreement with the ratification bonus also having effect which is over in other.