Ford’s Mulally Reaffirms Spain Commitment

ALICANTE, Spain – Ford plans to operate its Almussafes plant near Valencia at full capacity and follow through on its previously announced €1.2 billion ($1.5 billion) facility investment program for 2009-2015, CEO Alan Mulally says.

“Our intention is to fully use the production capacity of Almussafes,” Mulally tells Spanish media at a backgrounder here. “We have a plan to export the vehicles produced in Almussafes to 70 different countries.”

The Ford plant assembles the C-Max and Grand C-Max models and will start production of the new Kuga at the end of the year and the Transit Connect in 2013. A hybrid version of the C-Max also will be added into the mix in 2013.

Mulally says he is pleased with the platform consolidation plan that now has the auto maker producing 13 different models off the Focus architecture.

Ford is looking for ways to make all its European factories profitable in order to avoid closures, but Mulally admits some of the sites could be shut down.

Overcapacity isn’t the result of a temporary down cycle in the market “but a structural problem that every company must solve by itself,” he says, alluding to comments made by Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne.

Marchionne, who also holds the position of president of the ACEA, the European manufacturers group, has been calling on the European Commission to spearhead industry-wide restructuring and offer financial support to help auto makers reduce capacity.

Mulally’s message does not ease fears for workers at Ford’s Southampton, U.K., plant, where the right-hand-drive Transit is built, or the Genk, Belgium, factory, home of the S-Max, Galaxy and Mondeo models.

“We never came back to the production levels reached in Europe before the crisis,” Mulally says. “We are living in a global crisis where the asset accounting values do not match the real values.”