Don’t doubt the long-term potential of the traditional global car giants, says Stephen Odell, Ford’s retiring executive global sales and marketing boss – even if it’s fashionable to do so in a world increasingly focused on autonomous and electrified vehicles.
The winners, Odell believes, will be the companies that pay attention to the fast-changing requirements of customers – and he numbers Ford among them. The task will be to make “frenemies” of the emerging connectivity and data companies, as people adopt and use the new transportation and mobility services. Perhaps you’d expect a top-notch Ford retiree to spread love and optimism as he departs, but Odell is special.
He’s the “tough but fair” Romford-born Brit who led the downsizing of Ford’s European business, starting in 2012, that closed two UK plants and one in Belgium, and scaled down Ford’s operations in Germany, Russia and Romania, dramatically shrinking their workforces. It may not have looked like progress at the time, but it secured the company’s future in Europe by matching capacity to demand. Now Ford “and some others” are starting to prove their suitability for the brave new world.
Staying flexible
“The realisation that we were moving into an era of accelerated change started to be evident 10 or even 15 years ago when electric cars started to get fashionable,” explains Odell, who joined Ford in 1980. “Everything was going to be electrified, we were told by the new experts. That world tended to write off the prospects of companies like ours – with share prices and investment ratings – in the belief that we were too big and too inflexible to operate in the new way. But that’s wrong. The global car companies very much will make it, and they’re starting to prove it.”
