Ford vice president of revenue management Lloyd Hansen has told Reuters in an interview that US incentives are so high that any further increases are more likely to hurt profits than boost sales.
According to Reuters, Hansen said the company would not surrender to General Motors‘ incentive-driven push for sales although Ford lost 1.6 points of U.S. market share in 2002.
“We’re finding out that our (revenue) model is screaming at us to avoid taking incentives up further, and when the market starts to soften, let the production go down a little bit,” Hansen told Reuters in an interview.
“If you have competitors who don’t have a model like that and keep discounting and discounting, am I willing to give up market share to make money in the short term? The answer is no,” he added, according to Reuters. “Share is something we’re concerned about. We use the model then to say what’s the least costly way to keep our share at some level we want to be at.”
