DETROIT, June 24 (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co., which is shedding non-core assets as part of a back-to-basics turnaround plan, expects to announce the sale of British car repair chain Kwik-Fit by the end of this year, a company spokesman said on Monday.
"We're pegging it at sometime this year," spokesman Nick Sharkey said of the sale. "We're still looking at bids that we've received and we haven't made any decisions, but stay tuned in the future."
A weekend report in Britain's The Independent newspaper said Ford might pull Kwik-Fit off the market because bids it had received for it were below expectations.
But Sharkey denied that the world's No. 2 automaker, which reported a stunning $5.45 billion loss in 2001, had considered pulling Kwik-Fit off the auction block. The sale is key to Ford's plan to raise at least $1 billion through strategic asset divestitures this year.
In its 2001 annual report, Ford said it paid $1.1 billion over fair market value for the net assets acquired when it bought Kwik-Fit for $1.6 billion.
The 1999 acquisition was championed by former Chief Executive Jacques Nasser as part of what his many critics now deride as a misguided bid to push Ford beyond its traditional role as a manufacturing company and make it a diversified provider of consumer products and services.