LeX2K

True good point.

I think it is inevitable Tesla moves incorporation out of Delaware.

jrmckinley

Ford CEO tells Wall Street their "Pro" portion of their business is the future of the auto business and to "forget about Tesla and FSD." source: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/15/ford...ys-future.html

My take: not being familiar with Ford Pro, I took a quick look at the website. I don't see hardly anything that Tesla isn't already capable of offering to someone (commercial customers) with things like telematics, driving behavior data, camera videos, etc. They just don't have a business unit for it. But Musk might take the challenge, aka "message received." DETROIT – Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley on Thursday urged Wall Street to forget about Tesla and its FSD driver-assistance systems as the future of the auto industry, contending investors should instead focus on the Detroit automaker’s “Pro” fleet business.

Farley compared the unit, which roughly doubled pretax earnings last year to $7.2 billion, to where Deere & Co. was seven years ago. The farm equipment maker’s stock has increased by about 235% since then.

“If you’re looking for the future of the automotive industry, stop looking at FSD and Tesla. Look at Ford Pro. It’s got half a million subscribers with 50% gross margin,” Farley said during a Wolfe Research conference.

Ford Pro is made up of the automaker’s traditional fleet and commercial businesses as well as emerging telematics, logistics and other connective operations for business customers – ranging from local plumbers and electricians to massive corporations. It also includes parts and services for businesses.

Ford expects the Pro unit’s pretax earnings to increase to between $8 billion and $9 billion this year, the automaker said earlier this month. That compares with earnings expectations for the company’s “Blue” traditional business of about $7 billion to $7.5 billion and projected losses in its Model e EV business of $5 billion to $5.5 billion.

Tesla does not break out revenue or earnings from its premium driver-assistance software, marketed as its Full Self-Driving Beta, FSD or FSD Beta. Many Wall Street analysts have speculated that such software could bring in tens of billions of dollars per year by 2030.



Ford has said it expects revenue from telematics and other nontraditional subscription services to increase to $2,000 per vehicle annually, or about $167 a month, for Ford Pro in the years ahead. Farley reiterated Thursday that 20% of Pro’s overall revenue is expected to come from such services by 2026.

Farley reiterated that Ford Pro is undervalued within the automaker. Some on Wall Street agree.

Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas last week called Ford Pro the company’s “Ferrari,” referring to the extremely profitable luxury sportscar manufacturer that was significantly undervalued before being spun out of Fiat Chrysler in 2016.

“I remember a time when Fiat owned Ferrari, and I had a valuation of about $4 billion on it. Now Ferrari is worth $80 billion today, and the business was totally ignored by investors when it was part of Fiat,” Jonas said during Ford’s quarterly earnings call earlier this month. “Now Ford has a Ferrari, it’s called Ford Pro. And I think we agree, people are ignoring the cash cow.”

Jonas, a longtime Tesla bull, contended the business is being overlooked because profits from it are being siphoned to fund Ford’s “EV science project.”

Some investors may be skeptical of Farley’s comments. The Ford executive has previously discussed Ford being a growing competitor to Tesla with its vehicles and technologies, but that, in general, has largely not occurred yet.

Ford is delaying or cutting spending by billions of dollars on EVs, including domestic battery production, amid slower-than-expected adoption of its current models as well as significant losses on its electric vehicles. The company is in the middle of developing its next-generation EVs that it promises will be profitable within a year of going on sale.

Farley said Thursday that while EV demand is slower than expected for consumers, fleet customers are actually adopting all-electric vehicles faster than the company had anticipated.

The Pro operations are a major part of Farley’s “Ford+” restructuring and growth plan. The unit is led by Ted Cannis, who is considered a successful utility man within the company.

“We always had a super successful pro-business ... but there was no focus on it,” Farley said. “I think people are just starting to see [it].”

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

when i read 'nuance' i check my wallet.

Margate330

Ford's subscription service will die an instant death if Tesla offers that stuff for free and without subscription, which it should be. IMO

It's just an over priced subscription service for logistics and parts tracking from what I understand from article above, I may be wrong. 🤖

swajames

lol I don’t think you actually understand what Ford Pro actually is, who uses it and why.

Margate330

I'm sure I don't so please school us, won't hurt my feelings because I don't know much about it.

We live in a day where it's all about keeping the customer on the hook with monthly subscriptions and I know there's lot's of money to be made there -after the sale-.

$2k per year for a subscription, for a car already making payments on, geez. lol

swajames

Commercial vehicles and an entirely B2B fleet management and telematics service, details are all on their website ( and summarized above), but broadly it enables fleet managers to monitor vehicle health, locations, manage route efficiency, monitor driver behavior and more, and enables things like proactive mobile at-vehicle location service before parts break to keep vehicles on the road etc. While some of these services are replicable, the absolutely massive install base of Ford commercial and commercial use vehicles isn’t, and that’s what drives the huge revenues and customer stickiness.

its basically a third of the Ford business. Pro sells vehicles and services to commercial customers, Blue sells to retail customers, and Model E is the EV business unit.

patgilm

Not really accurate, the SEC just adopted cybersecurity rules that went in effect two months ago and only material breaches are required to be disclosed. Companies that got in trouble were ones that didn’t disclose material breaches that impacted companies or people who sold shares that had knowing of nonpublic information related to a breach.

jrmckinley

Everything in bold could be offered to commercial customers tomorrow if Tesla wanted to give it a run; they're already capturing all of that data. Ford's existing footprint of customers (and/or referred to as first mover advantage) would appear to be the only differentiator. Obviously there are going to be some commercial customers where EV's would never work due to range issues, there are going to be some customers where the types of EV's Tesla offers don't work, but there's absolutely a segment of the market where Tesla could go compete.

AMIRZA786

I'm guessing then that there is some other reason we have been asked to disclose breaches, we have been going through some audits and I'm constantly being asked about breaches, which thankfully has never happened on our network side

Margate330

Sounds like big pressure on you because you are a network specialist.
​​​​

jrmckinley

I'm in cyber security and can tell you with 99.9% certainty it's a CYA move for your CISO, CIO, and anyone else with oversight into security. The Solarwinds CISO was charged by the SEC for misleading investors about their security posture. Companies will now over-disclose in an effort to not have that happen to their executive team.

swajames

So the small matter of the lack of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of commercial customers is the only differentiator haha.

The most recent attempt at a Tesla commercial fleet was Hertz, a use case Ford Pro services supports, and we know how that turned out.

AMIRZA786

Haha we were actually using SolarWinds at the time of that breach (IPAM). I immediately shut down our IPAM server, but also Microsoft disabled all the SolarWind services in the host OS.

The biggest concern is phishing and social engineering. We've already had a couple of people fall for phishing emails with man in the middle attacks, but thankfully we caught them before any damage happened. In one case, someone gave an attacker access to their MS 365 email account, and the attacker tried to create fake invoices from existing vendors changing the banking information. Luckily they were only after money and protections put in place stopped the attack from being successful.

It seems that no matter how much training, the end user is always the weakest link

patgilm

Like JR said above, companies are going to be disclosing and CYA by over disclosing incidents because they don’t want to get second guessed but there have only been about 9 companies now that have disclosed breaches under the new rules so not as widespread as you think. I’ve been asked to look at many public companies specific cyber disclosures for compliance these days since this is the first time companies have to disclose their polices and I loath reviewing them because no one wants to over disclose their policies right now and everyone wants to benchmark against everyone else. Painful.