Ford said it will cut 3,000 salaried and contract jobs, mainly in North America and India, as part of its cost-cutting strategy to advance its electrification strategy amid inflation.
Electric cars have fewer parts and require less labor to assemble on the production line. That, added to the need to reduce costs in order to transform a century-old business model into a completely different one, has prompted manufacturers to reconfigure their swollen payrolls.
Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley has been saying for months that he believed the Dearborn, Michigan automaker had too many people and not enough of its workforce with the required skills as the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles and digital services.
“We are eliminating work, as well as reorganizing and streamlining functions across the business. You will hear more details from leaders in your area of the business later this week,” Farley and Ford president Bill Ford wrote in a joint email.
Sources with knowledge of the matter said that the operation in Mexico, which depends on the North American regional corporation, would not be affected, and that there are even new hires at the door.
Part of the reorganization undertaken by Ford to simplify its operations has included the concentration of support activities in service hubs , called the Global Solutions Center , which can no longer serve countries or regions, but the global operation. Until now Ford has established one in Europe (Hungary), another in Asia (India) and one more in America (Mexico).
Laura Castro, director of the Center for Global Solutions in Mexico, said in an interview in May that the location of these hubs will allow the US manufacturer to maintain continuous operation 24 hours a day , thanks to the fact that the three countries are in time zones. different: when in Mexico it is dawn, in Hungary it is morning and in India it is afternoon. “The idea is to have an operation from dawn to dusk,” he said.
These new solution centers will allow the American automaker to have globally optimized processes, instead of replicated positions in each of the markets in which it has a presence, in different strategic areas of the business, from Product Development, Engineering, Component Purchases , Information Technologies, After Sales and Human Resources.
The global operations center in Mexico, which began operations in January 2021, had generated savings of more than 14,000 million dollars until the first quarter of the year, according to company data.
Ford hired 604 people in Mexico during 2021 to work in the global solutions center, mainly profiles focused on product development and auto parts purchases.
So far this year it has added another 200 people and the plan is to reach 500 new positions by the end of 2022. Some of the profiles that the automaker is looking for are specialists in cloud computing , software, IT and app development.
With information from Ivet Rodríguez and Reuters
