Reuters reports that Ford has hired Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Morgan Stanley to sell-off its British luxury brands, Jaguar and Land Rover. A Citigroup analyst said the sale could raise $8 billion for the cash-strapped firm that lost $12.6 billion last year and $282 million in the first quarter of ’07. The analyst comments, “Given recent auto buyout activity, Ford would have reason to explore and could realize premium valuations.”
In March, Ford started dumping its European brands by selling Aston Martin for $925 million. The current round of sell-offs come as Toyota moves to overtake Ford as the second largest manufacturer in the US market. As Jaguar CEO Geoffrey Robinson said, “Ford has got some huge problems on its own, really huge.”
[This post was written by Grand Master Automotive Autoeroticist Peter Ribic]
Jaguar sale could secure Ford’s future [BBC]
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I’m so glad to see the separation of American and European brands. Who the fuck wants to drive around in a $150,000 Ford? Even worse is that entry level X-type Jag which is basically a $35K Taurus with a new body. Disgusting. At least Porsche is still true to form.
Of course, Porsche is true to form…making SUVs and convertible go-carts.
I saw that one coming as I hit the post button.
I honestly hated the idea of the Cayenne – but the higher end model is admittedly nice. Cheapening the brand with the Boxster was a worse offense, but at least it’s not a C-class Benz. My point was that the real Porsches are still true performance German automobiles without compromise.
The Lesson is that welding underperforming UK firms with quality and labour relations issues to an underpforming American firm with quality and labor relations issues doesn’t exactly work. Rather, any underperforming American firm with quality and labour relations issues is a bad merger partner and can create quality problems in the other firm.
Surprisingly Brits & Germans seem to work well together, maybe time to see if the Deutsche/Italian firm can work as a Deutsche/Anglo/Italian one. Would seem to be too many SUVs in one firm, but they need to prune their truck portfolio anyways and you could do interesting things adding Audi/Lambo/Porsche bits to a Jag.
They should have just killed Jag and put it out its misery.