Gearing up

Frankfurt, Sept. 14 (Reuters): Ford Motor Co, the No. 2 US automaker, will take an aggressive approach to cost controls under a restructuring plan expected to be announced later this year, a senior executive said today.

“We have to be very aggressive in terms of controlling costs,” chief operating officer Jim Padilla told reporters at the Frankfurt auto show.

"We will be aggressive. We will address costs. We will address our footprint as a business. We will address capacity," Padilla added.

Ford is yet to announce a turnaround plan for the North American auto unit and has said it was working on more restructuring moves to halt deep losses in its North American operations.

Ford has not ruled out deeper job cuts in its salaried workforce or a closure of manufacturing plants.

Padilla declined to be drawn on the company’s talks with the United Auto Workers union, but said Ford was closely watching the situation between the union and its US rival General Motors over the future of troubled parts supplier Delphi Corp.

“The Delphi situation has the shortest fuse. We have been watching the dialogue with GM,” he said.

Ford last week announced a management shake-up designed to stem deep losses in North America.

Strong competition, soaring health-care and raw material costs, and a slide in US market share have forced Ford to slash its profit forecast twice this year.

Padilla said the company was taking a more aggressive approach on design and had a strong pipeline of new products.

“We do see stability coming,” he said.

But Mark Fields, executive vice-president of Ford in Europe, said he could not put a date on when the automaker’s UK-based luxury brand Jaguar would start making a profit. Ford has said previously it expected Jaguar to break even in 2007. “We are not going to put a date on when Jaguar will return to profitability,” Fields said.

On Tuesday, he said Ford was starting to see savings at Jaguar from headcount reductions and from closing the Brown’s Lane Jaguar plant at Coventry in the English West Midlands this year.