Fred Harteis News Articles - Ford names new CEO

Fred Harteis News Articles - Ford Motor Co. Tuesday surprised the auto industry by tapping senior Boeing executive Alan Mulally as its new chief executive officer, succeeding current CEO Bill Ford, who will stay on as chairman.

Mulally, 61, who heads Boeing's commercial airplane unit, will become president and CEO of Ford immediately as the struggling automaker gets set to unveil a huge overhaul of its North American auto operations.

Mulally was most recently executive vice president at Boeing.

Shares of Ford rose about 1.5 percent on the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday and surged another 2 percent or so in after-hours trading.

The announcement came after the close of regular trading.

Industry analysts said that Bill Ford, the 49-year-old great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, was making a smart move but that more would be needed to halt the slide in market share for the nation's No. 2 automaker.

"I think Bill Ford was under some pressure to bring in additional leadership," Tim Ghriskey at Solaris Asset Management, an investment firm, told Reuters. "He remains as executive chairman, still very much in control, but I think this step to bring in new management from outside the company is a smart, mature action ... to move the company on to the next step."

Ghriskey noted that GM has made more headway in restructuring than has Ford.

"My point with Ford is and always has been, they wouldn't be in this position if they didn't have these problems on the product side," Erich Merkle, analyst at IRN Inc., told the news agency. "What Ford has to do on the product side is to get back to an understanding of why people purchase cars and take more risks in terms of design."

Bill Ford told employees just recently that the company needs a new business model and is considering turning to outside executives and making alliances with other carmakers, according to a Financial Times report on Sunday citing a memo it said was sent to staff.

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Source: Cnn.com

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