Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Ford is struggling to stem the bleeding at its embattled EV division, even as it expects the profitability of its wider business to bounce back this year.
In results released after the US market close on Tuesday, the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker posted a full-year net loss of $8.2bn for 2025 following a spectacular $19.5bn EV-related writedown it reported in December.
Adjusted fourth-quarter profits for 2025 of $1bn were down $1.1bn on the same period in 2024.
The company’s operations in 2025 were also waylaid by the impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs and two fires at the factory of a critical aluminium supplier.
Powered by US sales of pick-up trucks and SUVs, Ford expects to achieve an improved adjusted profit in 2026 of between $8bn and $10bn.
But it anticipates its electric “Model e” division to continue to record a loss of between $4bn and $4.5bn in 2026, after posting a $4.8bn loss in 2025 and a $5.1bn loss in 2023.
Chief financial officer Sherry House told reporters on Tuesday that the company did not expect the EV division to break even until 2029, although core profitability had improved as a result of shifting its focus from large all-electric vehicles in the North American market to smaller, higher volume EVs in Europe.
She said the division was also investing $1.5bn in a new subsidiary, Ford Energy, which will use licensed Chinese technology to produce energy storage batteries to serve the AI data centre construction boom in the US.
In December, Ford chief executive Jim Farley announced that the company was entering into a partnership with Renault to develop small electric cars and vans.
Ford is also in talks with Chinese automaker Geely over a potential partnership that could involve joint development of vehicles using the US company’s spare European production capacity.
Mitigating its EV-related woes, it has been buoyed by the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations in the US, which has allowed the company to sell more high-margin gasoline-powered trucks and SUVs and achieve a record annual revenue of $187.3bn in 2025.
