DETROIT – U.S. sales of Ford Motor’s new cars very last month declined by 33.1% from a year before thanks to an ongoing world wide shortage of semiconductor chips that’s wreaking havoc on the automotive marketplace, the firm stated Thursday.
The Detroit automaker’s revenue capped off a dismal month of U.S. car sales in August, which plummeted to an adjusted selling rate of 13.09 million vehicles. Which is the worst speed since June 2020 and down from this year’s peak of 18.5 million in April, according to automobile facts company Motor Intelligence.
Analysts envisioned the August providing pace to be among 13.1 million and 14.4 million motor vehicles, with J.D. Ability and LMC Automotive forecasting all round product sales to decrease by 13.7% compared with August 2020.
The product sales tempo for any provided thirty day period actions how quite a few cars and trucks the business would sell for the 12 months if it offered the exact same total each individual thirty day period. It’s a main barometer of the industry’s health and fitness and demand from customers.
August is historically a single of the larger car product sales months of the year, but the chip lack has triggered auto inventory levels to plummet to document lows and pricing of new automobiles and trucks to skyrocket.
The Ford business logo is exhibited on a indication outside of the Chicago Assembly Plant on February 03, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Visuals
Dealers only have about 942,000 motor vehicles in inventory for retail sale, in contrast with roughly 3 million before the coronavirus pandemic two a long time in the past, according to Thomas King, president of the details and analytics division at J.D. Power.
“Despite the fact that stock is arriving at sellers daily, it is merely replacing the automobiles getting sold, stopping dealers from growing inventories to a amount necessary to aid a better product sales rate,” King stated.
Whilst most main U.S. automakers have switched to quarterly product sales reporting, many other individuals that continue to report regular product sales these as Honda and Subaru also described double-digit losses in August. Toyota, Volvo, Hyundai and Kia claimed slight revenue raises or losses in contrast with a year ago.
Revenue of nearly each individual motor vehicle in Ford’s lineup ended up down previous month in contrast with previous yr, with incremental gross sales gains from some new automobiles this kind of as its Bronco SUVs. Most notably, Ford’s bestselling F-Sequence pickups declined by 22.5%.
Ford’s whole gross sales final month topped 124,176 autos. Truck gross sales ended up down by nearly 30%, though SUVs ended up off by 25.3% and car or truck profits fell by 86% from August 2020.
A silver lining for Ford previous month was that its retail revenue were up by 6.5% as opposed with July but still off by 33% from August 2020, according to Andrew Frick, vice president, Ford Sales U.S. and Canada.
Ford’s profits appear a working day after the automaker verified it was as soon as once again cutting manufacturing of its F-150 pickup truck and other extremely financially rewarding cars owing to the ongoing world lack of semiconductor chips.
The origin of the scarcity dates to early final 12 months when Covid caused rolling shutdowns of vehicle assembly plants. As the services closed, the wafer and chip suppliers diverted the sections to other sectors these types of as buyer electronics, which weren’t predicted to be as harm by remain-at-dwelling orders.
The issue is envisioned to price tag the world-wide automotive business $110 billion in revenue in 2021, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.