Bernard B. Silverstone - Ford Motor Credit Co. LLC
Management
Thank you, Steve. Let me add good morning to everyone, and on behalf of Marion, Neil and myself, thank you for dialing in or indeed joining via webcast. So, today, we will review our results for the second quarter and we'll look at key metrics and trends for the business, bring you up to speed on our funding, of course, and as usual take your questions. So we can get started if we can turn to slide one, where you should be familiar with this. We talked about this slide last quarter, but I did want to quickly touch on it, again, today, really to reinforce our focus on running our business with clear operating principles executed by our very experienced team. Consistency and discipline continue to define our origination practices and world-class customer service. Additionally, strong risk management and focus on business fundamentals are cornerstones of how we run the business and they really underpin our results. So if we can move to slide two and we will start the review of some of those results for our operations for the second quarter. So as you can see, in the second quarter, we made $400 million of pre-tax profit. Now that was lower than a year ago, but is still a very solid result and that puts us at more than $900 million in pre-tax profit for the first half of the year. Also, our receivables were up as we continue to grow in line with expectations and you'll see later how our worldwide credit losses were actually down for the second quarter versus the first quarter, but here you see that in the U.S. market our loss-to-receivable ratio was higher versus the second quarter last year. However, the loss-to-receivable ratio remains close to historically low levels and consistent with our expectations for this stage in the ongoing recovery, it continues to edge closer to the longer-term trends. For placements, our average placement FICO scores – just to remind everybody – this is one component of what we use for proprietary scoring models, but it remains very consistent and strong, and U.S. delinquencies, although slightly up, remaining at very low levels. So, starting on the next slide, Marion will go through the results in more detail.