Ford Stock Returns to 2021 Level

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 8, 8:15AM EST

Quick Read

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) stock is trading at about the same level as in January 2021.
The company has no way to save itself from an overwhelming onslaught to its sales.
The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 stocks and Ford wasn't one of them. Get them here FREE.

Ford Stock Returns to 2021 Level — © MicroStockHub / iStock via Getty Images

In January 2021, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) stock traded at $9.87. Recently, it traded at $9.76. The price shows that a planned investment of $30 billion in electric vehicles (EVs) and the complete failure of that investment have torn Ford’s value to pieces compared to the broader stock market.

It begs the question of why the Ford family has kept William Clay Ford Jr. as the head of the company. Even though his title is executive chairperson and not CEO, he is in charge of the company’s strategy and major investments. He is also chair of the powerful finance committee of the board.

Existential Threats

Ford is trapped.

Whatever mistakes the company has made in the past, it faces what CEO Jim Farley calls an “existential threat” from Chinese electric car companies. This is why its stock has little chance of moving up at all.

Ford is trapped in the United States. It has a modest market share in Europe at about 5% overall. Its China operation was highly profitable for years. That was a key to its success, as was the case with many of the largest Western multinational car companies. CNN recently reported that the market share of Ford and General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) was “disappearing” in China.

Ford’s only meaningful market is the United States. It has a market share of 13% there, just behind Toyota Motor Corp.’s (NYSE: TM) 14%. Market leader GM has a share of 17%.

Ford has another issue. In the United States, 36% of its sales are from the F-Series pickups. No other model has sales that are 10% of the total.

If the U.S. fortress built by tariffs on Chinese EVs, which are currently 100%, falls, Ford has no way to save itself from an overwhelming onslaught to its sales.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.