Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jim Farley: That is a very important question. The reality is we will — we are structuring our portfolio to compete in very specific segments. The crossover is turning out to be the core civic of the EV business. And the last thing we want to do is commoditize our products by dropping the price. Just look what happened to Henry Ford in the 20s in the early teens. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing play out here. We didn’t have to touch the pricing in offer Lightning and E-Transit because we pick the right segments. But the real driver of our future profitability on Model e is the second cycle products. We didn’t know when we designed these first three products. We didn’t know that our wiring harness for Mach-E was 1.6 kilometers longer than it needed to be.

We didn’t know it’s 70 pounds heavier and that that’s worth $300 a battery. We didn’t know that we underinvested in braking technology to save on the battery size. We didn’t know that we needed the world’s best aerodynamics to get the size of the battery smaller. And so now we have learned a lot and that second cycle of the product is in the factory right now being developed with a lot of new talent. So I’m very optimistic about our 8% because we are not going to be playing in the two-row commodity SUV market because that’s — because tried that in the ICE business, didn’t really work out for us. We want to play our hand, our strength, commercial, truck, larger vehicles on the category side. We do not want to have too many top ads because that costs a lot to engineer.

We want to have minimum choice for customers, but we want to design the smallest possible battery for competitive size, and we want to invest differently in our ICE business for radical simplification, 30%, 40%, 50% less fasteners, no brackets in the vehicle. I can go on and on. We’ll get into it at Capital Markets Day. I think we should expect all brands to protect growth when it comes to EV. And that for we have to expect negative pricing. And that means software and other items like that becoming even more critical. I can’t wait to show you our new electric architecture. To me, that’s the most critical strategic investment the Company is making, not our batteries, not the EV platforms, but our new fully updatable electric architecture because what we’ve learned on Pro is we can make real money on software.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ryan Brinkman from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Ryan Brinkman: Maybe to follow up on that. I heard you say in the prepared remarks that revenue for software services and charging rows 70% year-over-year in 2022. I remember you discussing like a potential $20 billion market opportunity by 2030 with a lot of exciting on Pro at the last Investor Day target for 33 million connected vehicles in 2028. But have you dimensioned how large or profitable this business may be currently? Or are you able to share any more interim goals such as what your expectations are for services revenue or services revenue growth in 2023? Or what the next catalyst might be here for this business, such as I don’t know, the number of vehicles launching with Blue intelligence or anything else we should be monitoring?