Ford CEO Has Words For Employees After “Mediocre” 2018

After a “mediocre” 2018, Ford CEO Jim Hackett, addressed his employees. Reuters reports an e-mail sent by Hackett to employees the No. 2 U.S. automaker would not accept last year’s “mediocre” results and said the company was aiming to nearly double its annual operating profit.

The automaker announced its fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, reporting a 2018 operating profit of $7 billion with a profit margin of 4.4 percent, down from 6.1 percent in 2017. Ford said last week that its target for operating margin was more than 8 percent.

The e-mail read, “2018 was mediocre by any standard. Yes, we made $7 billion last year. But think of it this way: this represents a 4.4 percent operating margin, about half what we believe is an appropriate margin. So we are aiming for much closer to $14 billion.”

And while Hackett didn’t give a timeline for hitting that $14 billion target, a Ford spokesman said Hackett was just doing the math to show employees how the margin target translated to overall profit.

Hackett also said that it was “time to bury the year (2018) in a deep grave, grieve over what might have been and become super focused on meeting, and, in fact, exceeding this year’s plan.”

Looking at Ford’s 2018 results, Hackett also said, “I become mad for a short time. Likely mad at myself, but also because I know we are better than that…I know that our competition hasn’t been better than us by magic.”