Ford says has "ample liquidity" for turnaround

By John McCrank

OAKVILLE, Ontario (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co has plenty of cash to fund the company's restructuring plan, now expected to include white-collar job cuts and a shift in production to more fuel-efficient cars, a senior executive said on Tuesday.

"We have ample liquidity to help fund our turnaround," Mark Fields, Ford's president for the Americas, said on the sidelines of an event to mark the production launch of the Flex crossover wagon at the company's Oakville, Ontario, plant.

Fields made the remarks in response to a question on whether the $23 billion borrowing program Ford undertook in 2006 would be sufficient for its revised restructuring plan.

The No. 2 U.S. automaker said last month it no longer expected to return to profitability in 2009 and it was preparing to lay off U.S. salaried workers by August 1 because the rapid downturn in the U.S. auto industry had stalled its turnaround plan.

Fields said Ford was still working on the details of plant-by-plant buyout offers it will offer in a bid to cut hourly workers and costs further.

Regarding the new Flex crossover, Ford had said it expected to sell around 75,000 of the vehicles in its first year of production, but Fields refused to say if the company was sticking with that forecast.

"Our approach is we're going to sell to customer demand and, you know, it's a little bit dicey these days giving sales forecasts because the industry is changing so fast."

To illustrate his point, he said that three years ago, 70 percent of the products Ford sold were trucks and SUVs, with the remaining 30 percent made up of crossovers and cars. In April, it was 62 percent cars and crossovers and 38 percent trucks and SUVs.

Fields said the demand for more fuel efficient vehicles was not going to go away and the company would continue to shift its production to meet that demand.

"The price of oil is in our estimation, not going down," he said.

Separately, figures released on Tuesday showed sales at Ford for the month of May were down 16 percent from a year earlier.

The launch of the Flex comes as General Motors announced plans to close four truck plants employing 10,000 workers, including a facility in Oshawa, Ontario.

(Reporting by John McCrank; editing by Rob Wilson)