On an earnings per share basis, Ford made 47 cents, exceeding the 37 cents per share consensus estimate among 17 Wall Street analysts.
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Revenue declined by less than 1% from the corresponding period in 2014, while worldwide sales climbed 2% as the car-maker sold more cars in Europe and in North America over the period than it did in the second quarter of 2014. The company’s revenues dipped by $0.1 billion to $37.3 billion.
Operating profit totaled almost $2.6 billion in North America, a company record for any quarter, and was linked to better pricing on new product launches, said Bob Shanks, Ford’s chief financial officer. New vehicles like the S-Max wagon in Europe and the Ka small auto in South America also commanded higher prices. Shanks said he now expects the margin to end the year at the high end of that range. That work isn’t quite done, but Ford essentially broke even in Europe with a $14 million pretax loss for the quarter, a slight drop from the $14 million profit it posted a year ago. Normal seasonal effects are likely to make the second half of the year somewhat worse than the first half, he said.
Ford’s U.S. June auto sales came in higher than some had expected when they were released earlier this month, but the company’s sales in China, the world’s largest auto market, were flat through the first half of the year. Lower sales volumes and slightly weaker pricing were not a surprise, but the impact was offset by some cost improvements.
Ford ended the second quarter with $20.7 billion in cash, up $1.2 billion from last quarter, and an additional $11 billion in available credit lines.
Ford’s long-term debt was $11.5 billion as of the end of the second quarter, up slightly.
CEO Mark Fields has pledged pretax profit will grow by as much as 51 percent this year as Ford resumes full output of the F-150, its top selling model.
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Ford lowered its 2015 forecast for industry sales in China to 23 million to 24 million vehicles, from 24.5 million to 26.5 million at the start of the year.
