Ford Motor Company

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Holly, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Ford Motor Company second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw a question, press the pound key. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Lynn Antipas-Tyson, Executive Director of Investor Relations. Lynn, I hand it to you. Thank you, Holly.

Welcome to Ford Motor Company's second quarter 2021 earnings call. With me today are Jim Farley, our President and CEO, and John Lawler, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us for Q&A is Marion Harris, CEO of Ford Credit. Today's discussions include some non-GAAP references. These are reconciled to the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures in the appendix of our earnings deck. You can find the deck along with the rest of our earnings materials as well as content from our Capital Markets Day at shareholder.ford.com. Today's discussion also includes forward-looking statements about our expectations. Actual results may differ from those stated. The most significant factors that could cause actual results to differ are included on page 21. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year-over-year. Company EBIT, EPS, and free cash flow are on an adjusted basis, and product mix is volume-weighted. A quick update on our upcoming IR events. On Monday, August 2nd, Barclays will host a fireside chat with John Waller and Lisa Drake, our Chief Operating Officer for North America. On Tuesday, August 3rd, Jeffries will host a virtual fireside chat with Alex Purdy, our Director for Business Operations for Enterprise Connectivity. And on August 11th, J.P. Morgan will host a virtual fireside chat with Hao-Tai Tang, our Chief Product Platform and Operations Officer. Now I'll turn the call over to Jim Farley.

Thank you, Lynn. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Early in the second quarter, two months ago, we detailed our strategy for the future of Ford. Put simply, our Ford Plus plan is focused on two things, really distinctive products that only Ford could do and an always-on relationship and experience for our customers that gets better and better over time. We're building on our foundational strengths, our iconic products, the uniquely appealing vehicles, our manufacturing excellence, and the industry's best captive finance company, but we're now adding new capabilities and new talents, and we're investing in new businesses that will accelerate our value we create for customers and our investors. We're committed to delivering a richer experience, for our Ford and Lincoln customers, one that improves over time with things like our over-the-air software upgrades, data-driven experiences, productivity and uptime services for our critical commercial customers, charging software, and a lot more. Ford Plus also means introducing the industry's most compelling high-volume electric vehicle lineup and investing the capital and human resources required to design and build world-class batteries and electric powertrain components. And with Argo AI, we're well positioned to launch an autonomous people and goods delivery business with significant future growth potential. But fundamental to transforming Ford is to further strengthen our auto operations while we're also expanding our addressable market. Our commitment is to earn your confidence with strong execution quarter after quarter, year after year, delivering solid returns regardless of the challenges that we face with external environment, like we did in the second quarter. Despite the many headwinds from the semiconductor shortage, some of which were unique to Ford, our team skillfully managed our business and we generated a positive EBIT. And I can tell you that this outcome was far from certain at the beginning of the quarter. It required intense focus from our team on cost, pricing, and mix. The primary advantage we have right now is the strength of our product portfolio. And it's about to get a lot stronger. We stopped making Me Too products in declining segments a few years ago. And we unleashed our product development team to create emotional and distinctive products that only can come from Ford. The Mustang Mach-E, which is already the second best-selling electric SUV in the United States, was recently named Car and Driver Electric Vehicle of the Year after rigorous testing against 10 other great EVs, including the Tesla Model Y Performance, the Porsche Taycan, and the audi e-tron the demand for our first round of high volume evs clearly has exceeded our most optimistic projections the reservations for the f-150 lightning have now climbed well past 120 000 units and 75 of those customers are new to ford we're now working around the clock to break constraints and increase our manufacturing capacity for these red hot new battery electric vehicles. We're working with LG Chem, SKI Innovation to increase our annual battery capacity for the Mustang Mach-E by 70% and we're taking similar actions ahead of the launches of the E-Transit later this year and the F-150 Lightning early next year. The customer and critical reception to our new Bronco lineup has also been remarkable. In June, we started shipments to fulfill 125,000 orders we have for Bronco 2 and 4 door models. And 70% of those Bronco customers are also new to Ford. And then there's the Maverick, our upcoming hybrid pickup that offers room for five, gets 40 miles per gallon in the city, and is priced starting at less than $20,000. And customer already recognized the value of this product, and the initial interest to our dealers is more than almost 80,000 orders. Great products alone are not sufficient, though, to deliver Ford Plus. Always-on means we are regularly interacting with our customers on things large and small, and we're building new capabilities like connected services to enrich the customer experience and drive reoccurring revenue streams. We developed a proprietary software and hardware stack we call Blue Oval Intelligence to deliver updates to customers' vehicles over the air. Some of our competitors can do it for their entertainment systems. We do it for almost all of our modules in the vehicle. For example, the Mustang Mach-E activation rates, the number of customers who opt in to connected services like FordPass, are now over 95%. We have now updated more than 150,000 vehicles over the air just this year. And we expect this, the top 600,000 vehicles by year end. And by 2028, we will have 33 million OTA capability vehicles on the road around the world. And we're mining the real world data from these vehicles real time to better meet our customer needs. To me, this is the most important point. For example, Driven by the vehicle data from the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 already, we've identified $50 million in efficiencies just from warranty cost avoidance and other opportunities. We're also building out our global Ford Pro commercial business, which we expect to grow from $45 billion in 2025 from $27 billion in 2019. Last month, we announced our acquisition of Electrify, to help accelerate electric vehicle fleet adoption by offering those customers the best scaled depot charging experience for all commercial customers. It's an example of how we're building out Ford Pro now. In mobility, we are now focused on planning and executing a phased deployment of AVs that will lead to large-scale commercialization of Ford's AVs. Last week, as you've seen, We reached the industry-first collaboration between Argo and Lyft to deploy Ford driverless vehicles on the Lyft TNC network. This collaboration will enable commercial deployment at scale and demonstrate Ford and Argo's ability to connect into multiple TNCs or transportation networks. And on the technology front, Argo, I'm really excited about this, introduced Argo LiDAR. which will help us expand our autonomous services beyond the dense urban areas that most are focused on. This new LIDAR, designed to be cost effective and manufacturing at scale, will offer what we believe is the industry's longest distance sensing range of 400 meters with dark object detection for safe highway driving. Now, before John reports on the quarter and our expectations for the rest of the year, let me give you an update on the semiconductor situation. In April, we said we'd expect to lose about 50% of our planned volume in the second quarter, which then implied a loss in adjusted EBIT. In fact, we did better than expected. We leveraged a strong demand to optimize our revenue and profits. We're seeing signs of improvement in the flow of chips now in the third quarter, but the situation remains fluid, especially due to the delay and ramp up of one of our key suppliers, Renesys, that Ford is uniquely exposed to in the first half. Overall, after effectively managing through the first half, we are now spring loaded for growth in the second half and beyond because of those red-hot products, pent-up demand, and improving chip supply. Navigating these chip constraints has led us to make important permanent changes in our business model at Ford. We are modernizing our go-to-market strategy. What does that mean? We're placing a greater emphasis on build-to-order sales bank, not just low stocks. We have learned that yes, operating with fewer vehicles on lots is not only possible, but it's better for customers, dealers, and Ford. But we're also driving a significant increase in the number of customers configuring and ordering their vehicles online so we have better visibility to real demand using an order bank. This allows us to lower inventories, simplify our incentives, and reduce our order complexity in the industrial systems cost. For our customers, upside is that they more quickly get the precise vehicle they want. Now, this isn't theoretical. I hope we get into the Q&A. We're doing it right now as we speak. Relative to the supply chain, we made three notable changes. First, we are no longer relying heavily on the tier procurement structure for transparency. We're now engaging directly, for example, with the fabs on semiconductors and key points in the supply chain for our critical components, electronic components. With closer relationships and more transparent exchange of information, such as technology roadmaps, we can integrate their know-how into our designs to better align supply and demand. We are providing longer-term forecasts to critical vendors so they can better understand and accommodate our requirements. And third, we are more comprehensively scanning for obstacles in our supply chain. Risk mitigation actions include stockpiling of critical parts like semis, dual sourcing, and design interchangeability in the case of single sources. These changes are all being applied to new technologies as well, including batteries, which are rapidly becoming a larger portion of our bill of material at Ford. Our pending joint venture with SK Innovation, called Blue Oval SK, will produce EV battery cells and arrays, helping us secure supplies of batteries at competitive cost and performance levels really critical given our demand for our new electric vehicles. And now I'd like to turn it over to John to take us through the results for the quarter and our outlook.