Ford Posts Rough Earnings, Suspends Guidance Due to Tariffs
Ford is the latest automaker to suspend financial guidance in its 2025 full-year forecasts in the wake of seesawing tariff announcements by the Trump Administration that are making outlooks difficult to predict, supply chain disruptions likely, and losses seemingly unavoidable.
In releasing its first-quarter 2025 earnings, Ford says tariffs are estimated to cost $2.5 billion this year, but it has a plan to offset $1 billion of it. The extra cost is on top of earnings that have fallen dramatically from a year ago, with net income dropping 65 percent.
The automaker said it will provide a guidance update when it reports its second-quarter earnings this summer. By then it hopes to have a better idea of the impact of tariffs, consumer reaction, how the competition is handling it, and learn more about other government tax and emission policies affecting the auto industry, chief financial officer Sherry House said on a call with analysts.
General Motors suspended guidance when it released its quarterly earnings April 29, awaiting more clarity on auto tariffs announced last week. It issued new, lower guidance, two days later. GM put the cost of tariffs at $4 billion to $5 billion, a reflection of the fact that GM has a lower percentage of U.S.-built vehicles than Ford. GM will take measures to offset about a third of the additional cost.
Stellantis also suspended guidance due to evolving trade policies. Others who have held back forecasts include Mercedes-Benz and Volvo amid the uncertainty created by U.S. trade policies.
Ford Income, Revenue, Deliveries All Down
Before the tariffs, Ford was tracking to meet its targets and achieve adjusted earnings of $7 billion to $8.5 billion this year, executives said. To start the year, Ford reported first-quarter net income of $471 million—a five percent drop—on $40.7 billion in revenue. Adjusted income (excluding taxes and interest) was $1 billion for the first three months of the year, a 63 percent falloff. The number of new vehicle deliveries was down 7 percent to 971,000.
The good news: quality is up, which means warranty costs were down, said chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra. The automaker has also made strides in reducing cost, on pace for $1 billion in net cost reduction this year (excluding the impact of tariffs).….
By division, Ford Pro, the commercial vehicle arm, brought in $1.3 billion in adjusted earnings, less than half the profit record a year ago. Ford said it was due to some plant downtime and lower fleet pricing. But subscriptions for software services are up 20 percent.
Electric Vehicle Losses Grew Smaller
At the other end of the spectrum, Ford Model e, the electric vehicle side of operations, reported a loss of $849 million which is better than the $1.3 billion loss in the same quarter in 2024. And retail sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. increased by 15 percent from a year ago, helped by the offering of home chargers and free installation.
Ford Blue—vehicles with internal combustion engines—only brought in $96 million in adjusted earnings, a steep dive from $901 million a year ago. Volume was down with downtime at the Kentucky assembly plant that makes the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, but the new models are selling for 18 to 23 percent higher prices, said Andrew Frick, president of Forde Blue and Model e.
House said half the extra tariff costs are on imported vehicles, the other half are on parts crossing the border. Ford does source most of its steel and some of its aluminum in the U.S. but the tariffs on them could result in higher domestic prices. Despite the government actions, Ford has not changed its North American production plans.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said he understands what the Administration is trying to do, returning more manufacturing, including for parts, to the U.S. in what increasingly feels like a regional business, but he hopes the government will understand the flexibility needed for companies like Ford to succeed.
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Fast Company
38 minutes ago
- Fast Company
‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector's emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the conversation. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto's evolution? Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. 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So you're correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don't otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that's kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off. A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don't really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that's where the interest in stablecoins came about. There's a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it's of course because we're the global reserve currency, so there's a lot of safety there. Trump seems like he's done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He's launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump's crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets? I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. But let's just say he's president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you're basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was. Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. 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Yahoo
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- Yahoo
What is Aukus, the submarine deal between Australia, the UK and US?
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