Ford said it remains committed to sustaining profitability in a weaker European industry as it maintained its position as Europe’s second best-selling passenger car brand for the first half of 2010.

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The company continued as market leader in the UK, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland and Turkey as well as reporting significant gains in Spain for the first six months, up 32.2%. Sales also grew in Italy and France.

Fiesta, Focus and Transit were Ford’s top three best-selling vehicles in the first half.

Ford Europe marketing and sales head Ingvar Sviggum said: “The market is weakening as a result of the ending of scrappage schemes and the continuing frailty of the European economic recovery. But we expected this to happen this year, and have a robust plan to deal with the situation.

“We said we would be competitive in the market but that we would pull back from some business – even at the cost of reduced share and volume – if that business was detrimental to our profitability. However, we are doing well in growth markets, and increasing our volumes and share in Russia, Turkey and Spain.

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“We will not sacrifice profitability for volume or share, as some of our competitors seem to be doing. We believe such unsustainable heavy discounting only damages brand reputation and further weakens the market. You’ll have to wait until our second quarter results later this month to see our latest figures, but we did have a close to US$700m turnaround in our performance for the first quarter.”

June was the third consecutive month of decline in the European new car industry and Ford’s registrations for the month of 118,800 units were 24,400 lower than June 2009.

First half vehicle sales in the main 19 European markets totalled 716,900 vehicles, 29,300 down on 2009.

Ford UK cutting small car prices too