Focus on Asia

Asia offers tremendous opportunities for our company. The fastest-growing markets for automobiles are in rapidly developing countries, especially China and India. China will remain the largest car market in the world for the foreseeable future, and India is projected to be the third-largest market in the world for the coming decade. By 2020, annual vehicle sales in the Asia Pacific Africa region will likely reach 49 million vehicles, with about 32 million of them in China.²

We estimate that 60 to 70 percent of Ford’s growth in the next 10 years will come from this part of the world. Today, one in every five vehicles we sell globally is in Asia Pacific. By 2020, it will be one in three. Between now and the end of the decade, there will be a total driving age population of 2 billion in Asia Pacific, including 1.15 billion in China and 500 million in India, with their average annual income beyond the vehicle ownership threshold level (equal to approximately $5,000 per capita GDP³).

To keep pace with this enormous growth, we are building new plants and expanding existing ones, hiring workers, growing our dealer networks, and further developing our supply chain across China, India and Thailand.

We are investing $6.7 billion in Asia Pacific and currently employ some 23,000 people in our wholly owned and consolidated joint ventures in the region. We are building or have recently opened 10 new plants in Asia Pacific – seven in China, two in India and one in Thailand. By 2015 we’ll have the capacity to produce 2.7 million vehicles in the region.

In 2014, we will open our Changan Ford Automobile (CAF) Chongqing #3 Assembly Plant and CAF Chongqing Transmission Plant in Chongqing, China – our largest manufacturing concentration outside of Michigan.

To fuel all of this growth, we plan to hire about 6,000 employees in Asia Pacific in 2014, the majority of them hourly. We also have announced plans to expand our research and development facility in China, where we now have our regional headquarters, boosting the number of employees by more than 50 percent through 2018. We plan to add approximately 200 new employees each year, bringing the number of research and development employees to around 2,000 people.

Our strategy in Asia Pacific continues to be to grow aggressively with an expanding portfolio of global products with manufacturing hubs in China, India and Thailand.

Our market share in the region was a record 3.5 percent for 2013, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2012. The improvement was driven by China, where our market share for the full year rose to a record 4.1 percent, up by 0.9 percentage points compared with 2012.

In China, Ford manufactures and sells passenger vehicles through its joint venture Changan Ford Automotive (CAF), in which it has a 50 percent stake. Commercial vehicles like the Ford Transit are manufactured and sold through Jiangling Motors Corporation (JMC). Ford owns a 32 percent stake in JMC.

In 2013, we added about 100 dealers in China, bringing the total number of Ford dealers in China to over 600. This doesn’t include new Lincoln dealers in China, which we are in the process of recruiting. We will be bringing the Lincoln portfolio to China in the second half of 2014 to tap into the luxury car segment in one of the world’s most important auto markets.

In India, meanwhile, the number of dealers is projected to grow by 22 percent between 2013 and 2015. India is becoming a global export hub for Ford.