By Jim Cramer and the AAP Team
Ford’s Capital Markets Day kicks off this morning at 9:30 a.m, and the company made several big announcements ahead of the event in the press release here.
Most notably, Ford (F) announced plans to accelerate its investment in electric vehicles and battery development to more than $30 billion by 2025. This is a solid step up from the $22 billion Ford previously earmarked to investment in electrification, and we think investors will appreciate this increased focus given how fast the industry is transitioning away from internal combustion engines.
Additionally, Ford finally put a target around how much of their global fleet will be fully electric by the end of this decade. Ford now anticipates 40% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030. Ford’s EV fleet includes the Mustang Mach-E, which has brought in so many new customers to Ford, the newly introduced F-150 Lightning, which now has 70,000 customer reservations, and the upcoming E-Transit, which Ford said will be on the road later this year. We continue to believe Ford’s highly recognizable car brands positions them to be a leader in EVs.
The company is also establishing a new global vehicle service and distribution within Ford that is dedicated to commercial and government customers. It’s called Ford Pro, and the company plans to increase the commercial market for hardware and adjacent and new services that are addressable by Ford by providing customers with greater value and higher productivity. Ford sees this business achieving company revenue of $45 billion by 2025, up from $27 billion in 2019.
Connected Services is also a big focus. Ford said it will have about one million vehicles that are capable of receiving over-the-air system updates on the road by the end of this year. Ford said it will exceed Tesla’s (TSLA) volume by July 2022, scaling to 33 million OTA-enabled Ford and Lincoln vehicles by 2028. By deploying distinctive connected functions like Ford’s BlueCruise driver-assist technologies, new features and upgraded software content, and EV charging to improve the user experience, Ford believes it will capitalize on the $20 billion projected market by 2030.
Last but certainly not least, Ford said it expects to achieve an 8% adjusted EBIT margin in 2023. We’ll look for management to trace out a credible path to this goal during their presentation.
Shares of Ford are rising back above $13 in early trading Wednesday. We’ll be tuning in to the presentation to find out more about management’s EV and connected services plans.
