Ford's loss narrows to 353m pounds

FORD, Britain's biggest-selling car company, yesterday announced a loss of pounds 353m for last year but declared that it had turned the corner out of recession. Ian McAllister, Ford's chairman, personally felt the pain, his salary falling by 40 per cent from pounds 158,454 to pounds 94,129.

The loss compares with a pounds 224m profit at Vauxhall and a loss of just pounds 49m at Rover. But it still represented an improvement of pounds 234m on Ford's pounds 587m loss in 1991 and would have been another pounds 68m lower without the cost of 5,000 redundancies.

Mr McAllister attributed the improvement in 1992 to a substantial increase in exports from Dagenham, Halewood and Southampton and improved productivity at all three plants. But he warned that it would be much more difficult to sustain export levels this year because of the downturn in Continental car markets.

Comparison with Ford's 1991 results is complicated by the fact that 1991 included a pounds 157m loss for Jaguar and a one-off pounds 57m profit from the sale of Ford's tractor division, Ford New Holland, to Fiat. Stripping out these, the underlying reduction in losses was pounds 134m.

'With the beneficial impact of Ford's restructuring programme beginning to make a contribution, I now believe we have turned the corner,' Mr McAllister said. 'It is time to put the recession behind us.'

Ford's UK workforce fell from 40,300 in 1991 to 35,300 at the end of last year and has since declined by a further 3,600. Production of cars and commercial vehicles remained virtually unchanged at 447,000. But the proportion of cars built for export rose from 36 per cent to 44 per cent.

Meanwhile, Nissan confirmed that the workforce at its Sunderland plant will be cut this year because it has decided to freeze all recruitment in the face of declining export sales.

Sunderland employs 4,600. Assuming natural wastage of 5 per cent this year, that would mean 230 job losses. Nissan stressed, however, that there would be no redundancies.