Listen to enough auto executives detail their growth plans, compare them to forecasts of the global auto market and you quickly realise that their collective market shares would have to be well over 100 per cent. But who will walk the walk as well as they talk the talk in this zero-sum game?
Ford, which unveiled plans on Tuesday to raise unit sales by 50 per cent by the middle of this decade, has more credibility than most to back up such bold goals. If industry forecasts of emerging market auto demand are correct, then this new target “only” means a global market share gain of a single percentage point to around 8.2 per cent, comparable to its progress in the US market recently.
But repeating this globally is far more ambitious. It will require a continuation of Ford’s shift to smaller cars and playing catch-up in China and India. In the past decade it has quadrupled its proportion of sales to Asia and Africa and hopes to double it again to nearly a third by 2020 through entering more segments. Doing so at a competitive price will rely on its still-incomplete “One Ford” programme, begun in 2006 to launch five global platforms. Ford hopes that this, along with an improving brand image, will allow it to increase global margins to 8-9 per cent from 6.1 per cent today.