Working with Dealers

Our dealers are a critical part of our success and important economic contributors to the communities in which they work. They represent the face of Ford in communities across the United States and provide employment, tax support, community leadership and customer service.

As we have with all of our stakeholders, Ford is taking a proactive, collaborative approach to working with our dealers to appropriately size our dealer network to match our sales, market share and dealer sales objectives. Ford's dealer network revitalization plan focuses our efforts on the largest 130 metropolitan market areas, which represents more than half of Ford's retail sales. Customer convenience factors such as driving distance, location and the appearance of the facility are taken into consideration as part of our analysis. This continues to be an ongoing process. Ford is not mandating dealer consolidations nor competitive cost actions. Instead, Ford and its dealers are working together to continue finding solutions that make Ford and its dealers competitive and best positioned to support customers.

In the United States at year-end 2005, we had 4,396 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury dealers, with 2,242 of those dealers in our largest 130 markets. As of year-end 2009, we had approximately 3,550 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury dealers, a reduction of almost 900 dealers, or approximately 20 percent. We will continue to work collaboratively with our dealers to reduce our dealer network to match our sales, market share and dealer sales objectives.