DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford Motor Co.’s top two executives received nearly $100 million worth of stock for their performance during 2009 and 2010, years in which the company’s profits and stock price surged.
The awards, disclosed in regulatory filings late Monday, are considered excessive by some
Ford assembly line workers. But Wall Street may not see it that way. Ford’s stock price rose 3 percent on Tuesday.
CEO Alan Mulally, credited with propelling the company from staggering losses a few years ago to profits of $2.7 billion in 2009 and $6.6 billion last year, received stock valued at $56.5 million before taxes.
The man who hired Mulally, Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr., got stock worth $42.4 million, according to paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Salaries and other compensation were not listed and will be revealed later this year.
The Dearborn, Mich., company was in financial peril late in 2006 when Ford removed himself as CEO and hired Mulally away from The Boeing Co. Ford Motor Co. lost $12.6 billion that year.
Under Mulally, the company mortgaged assets including its blue oval logo to borrow more than $23 billion, allowing it to weather the recession. It avoided filing for bankruptcy or following General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC in taking government aid.
Ford sold or shuttered five of its seven brands, closed or sold a quarter of its plants and cut its global work force by more than a third. It plowed the savings back into well-received new vehicles such as the Ford Fusion sedan and Ford Edge.
Mulally also improved reliability and shifted Ford’s model lineup from trucks and SUVs to smaller vehicles in case higher gasoline prices changed what car buyers wanted. Sales rose 20 percent last year.
Joe Phillippi, president of New Jersey-based AutoTrends Consulting LLC and a former Wall Street analyst, said the stock awards are not out of line given Ford’s turnaround.
“They made a lot of money for a lot of people,” he said.
Mulally, he said, was the catalyst for Ford’s comeback. “He deserves a tremendous amount of credit.”
But the stock awards won’t sit well with some of Ford’s 40,000 U.S. assembly line workers.
Gary Walkowicz, a Ford worker in Dearborn, said it’s another reason workers must demand to get back benefits and wages they gave up to help the company when it struggled.
“They can’t claim poverty,” he said of Ford. “The concessions we gave up have given them abnormally high profits considering the economy is in a down period.”
Since 2005, the union gave up cost of living pay raises, changed inefficient work rules and agreed to take responsibility for retiree health care with a trust mostly funded by Ford. But the factory workers this month will receive $5,000 profit-sharing checks from the company, the first such checks since 1999.
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