Euro Fords off target

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Ford's German-designed products remain below the sales radar in this country.

Fiesta's sales for the first five months of 2008 have improved on the year-to-date for 2007 (up from 2679 units to 3303 for 2008), but Ford has sold the light car ahead of the allocation for this year, meaning relatively little stock left for the rest of the year.

"We're getting all we're getting," says Mark Winslow, Ford's Vice President Marketing & Sales.

"We have clearly done very well in the first half of the year, so we will be supply-constrained in the second half of the year."

From a glass-half-empty perspective, Ford has been stymied by the inability of foreign plants to supply product at adequate levels and prospective Fiesta buyers can expect to wait for the specification of car they want, if it's not in Ford's current inventory.

So the current YTD performance of the Fiesta is a flash-in-the-pan -- and sales within the segment (relative to competitors) will diminish gradually over the rest of the year.

Even Fiesta's sales performance through to May of this year is a success only compared with the Fiesta's 2007 performance, rather than by comparison with the light car competition in 2008.

Fiesta's 2008 YTD sales of 3303 units are nearly 2000 behind the Daewoo Kalos-based Holden Barina, over 2000 short of the Suzuki Swift and at least a thousand behind the Honda Jazz. Mazda2 is nearly 3000 ahead, Hyundai Getz sells more than twice as many and even the new-to-market and largely unknown Nissan Micra (imported from Europe, just as the Fiesta is) is within 500 units of the Ford.

As for Toyota Yaris, the ratio of sales is over three to one, against the Fiesta.

The company's experience with the Fiesta exemplifies the difficulty in balancing stock levels against the great unknown of monthly demand. It has also been hindered by eye-of-a-needle supply for Focus, Mondeo and (currently) the Transit range of commercials.

In small cars, the Focus is over 600 units behind its 2007 YTD sales (7184 versus 7796 in '07) and Ford attributes that to the success of the run-out program for the superseded model in May of last year.

"In terms of Focus, we were in run-out in May of '07," says Winslow, "so we had a monster May -- I think we did 2100 in the month of May last year..."

That skews the comparative results, but -- based on the VFACTS figures for this year -- Focus has averaged fewer than 1500 units a month -- some way below former Ford president Tom Gorman's expressed desire for Focus to sell at 2000 a month.

We mentioned in our report late last year (more here) that Gorman was not satisfied with sales of Focus to date and felt the small car needed to be the next priority after the launch of the FG Falcon -- still coded 'Orion' as it was at the time.

Given that local production of Focus is still two years away, Ford debatably needs to find ways of improving sales of the currently imported model to meet the 2000 per month target that Gorman believed was possible (more here).

Gorman had predicted that a locally-manufactured Focus should achieve sales of 3000 a month (more here), but even the imported car currently available should be selling around 2000 a month.

Without adequate supply for its imported passenger cars (and Transit), Ford will be hard-pressed to establish these models as immediately recognisable names ahead of the company's move to local production for the Focus in 2010.

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