Ford tells employees January sales fell short

Ford Motor Co., trying to end more than a decade of U.S. market share losses, told employees it fell short of its targets for U.S. sales in January and expected to miss them for the rest of the quarter.

Retail sales, or those to individual customers, missed the company’s goal by 10,600 vehicles last month, the Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker told employees in an internal report Wednesday. That represents about 1 percentage point of market share, according to the Detroit News, which disclosed the report Friday.

“This is a snapshot in time,” said Ford spokesman Oscar Suris, who confirmed details of the report but declined to provide a copy. “It shows how we are stacking up against our objectives. Forecasts do change.”

Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker behind General Motors Corp., made the forecasts for this quarter after a record loss of $12.75 billion last year. The company’s U.S. market share fell 1 percentage point to 16.4% last year, according to Autodata Corp., marking its 11th annual decline in a row.

This year “will be just as bad as 2006, if not worse,” said Erich Merkle, an auto analyst at consulting firm IRN Inc. in Grand Rapids, Mich. “I don’t see them stabilizing at all until late 2008 or early 2009.”

Ford and GM are cutting jobs and closing factories in North America as they lose U.S. market share to Asian competitors, led by Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.

Ford has said its market share will decline again this year as it cuts back sales to rental car companies and focuses on more profitable sales to individuals.

The automaker’s internal report included the results of an employee survey, which found that 47% of workers had confidence that Ford would achieve long-term success. Suris said that 40% to 45% of employees surveyed believed that Ford’s Way Forward restructuring plan, announced in January 2006 and expanded in September, would work.

The employee survey results were based on a sampling of about 15,000 workers in Ford’s Americas unit, Suris said. The results were “not atypical of a company engaged in a turnaround effort” and “may improve as the turnaround progresses.”

Ford shares fell 7 cents to $8.53.