Ford Is Shifting Gears on Its Target Markets

During the industrial revolution era in the United States, Ford Motor Company (F) played an instrumental role. As noted earlier in this series, the Model T, being a low-priced utility vehicle, was the first motor vehicle to attract middle-class consumers including farmers.

In this article, we’ll take a look at Ford’s target markets and how its focus is shifting toward emerging markets as well.

North America and Europe are two important geographic regions for Ford Motor Company. The US accounts for more than half of Ford’s total revenues. From 2012 to 2014, the company’s automotive sector sales grew by 5.5% in North America.

During the same period, overall industry sales in the European market remained stagnant due to economic concerns and unemployment conditions in the region. In 2014, Ford had a market share of nearly 14.2% in North America, with 2.8 million vehicle units sold in the year. This was much higher than the company’s global market share of 7.2%.

Automobile demand from the Asia-Pacific region has been increasing at a rapid pace lately. Ford has also been improving its presence in the region to capture the major portion of the demand coming from emerging markets such as China and India.

Notably, within two years, from 2012 to 2014, the company’s sales volume in China rose by nearly 78% against Chinese automobile industry growth of 26% within the same period. This also helped the company to increase its market share in China from 3.2% in 2012 to 4.5% in 2014.

Note that in the passenger car segment of China, Ford Motor Company’s market share is still behind those other automobile giants (XLY) such as Volkswagen (VLKAY), Toyota (TM), and the Chevrolet brand of General Motors (GM).

Continue to the next article for a look at the overall trend in Ford’s global market share and to know the key factors that impact the company’s global market share.