If you’ve kept up with any news from the presidential campaign trail, you might know that Ford Motor Company has been just one of a number of bullying targets for Republican candidate Donald J. Trump. The presidential hopeful has repeatedly decried the automaker’s plans to invest in its Mexican operations, saying that were he president, he would use the looming threat of a punitive tariff to get Ford to reconsider.
Ford CEO Mark Fields has repeatedly responded by citing the automaker’s sizeable investments here in the US: both those in the company’s recent past, and in its near future. As The Hill reports, Mr. Mark Fields spoke to CNBC in New York last week, denying that Ford is forsaking the US for overseas hubs like Mexico.
“The last I looked, Ford Motor Company is here to stay in the United States,” he told the network. “It’s presidential politics. We’re just going to stay focused on the facts. We are very proud as a company of what we do in terms of contributing to economic development here in the US.”
The Ford CEO believes that Donald Trump is willfully neglecting to mention all the good the automaker does in improving the US economy. For instance, Ford has “invested over $10 billion since 2011 in our facilities,” said Mark Fields. “We’ve hired over 25,000 people. Over the next four years we’re going to invest another $9 billion and hire another 85,000 folks.
“It’s really important for us to be successful in our home market. We love what we do to the economy.”
Ford last year announced some $2.5 billion in planned expansions to manufacturing in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Guanajuato, and is expected to announce a new, separate plant in San Louis Potosi with a price tag of $1.5 billion.
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