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July 2016 Sales For Ford: Broad-Based Declines

Aug. 02, 2016 9:50 AM ETF
Anton Wahlman profile picture
Anton Wahlman's Blog
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Ford (F) reported U.S. 2016 June month sales:

https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2016/08/02/july-2016-sales.html

A 2.8% July decline now means the year is up "only" 3.5%. The bright spots in the month were few:

Edge (mid-size two-row SUV): Up 4.9% for the month; up 10.8% for the year.

Expedition (large SUV): Up 118.4% for the month; up 42.9% for the year.

Transit (commercial van): Up 41.2% for the month; up 36.8% for the year.

Lincoln MKX (similar to Ford Edge): Up 5.4% for the month; up 57.5% for the year.

Ford cop car: Up 27.6% for the month; up 29.7% for the year.

Those four were the relatively rare exceptions, however. Virtually all other models were down either for the month, for the year-to-date, or both.

This includes bread-and-butter vehicles such as Fiesta, Focus, C-Max, Fusion, Taurus, Explorer and Lincoln Navigator. This is broad-based weakness.

I interpret these broad-based declines as a function of some combination of these two things:

  1. A weakening of the overall U.S. economy.

  2. A deliberate draw-down of inventory levels, including tightening of credit standards.

This weakness is what I predicted in my piece published on July 1. It's hard to say that it will continue in the coming months, but my guess is that whatever was going on in July is likely to prevail for most of the rest of the third quarter, at a minimum.

Analyst's Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, but may initiate a short position in TSLA over the next 72 hours.

At the time of submitting this article for publication, the author was long GOOGL and FCAU. However, positions can change at any time. The author regularly attends press conferences, new vehicle launches and equivalent, hosted my most major automakers.

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