Ford Motor reported its earnings for the fourth quarter, which was its highest for the fourth quarter in over a decade. The automaker reported earnings of $1.7 billion during the last three month of 2012, due in large part to an increase in SUV and truck sales along with higher prices for all models.
Earnings were 31 cents per share, which beat forecasts from Wall Street of as high as 28 cents per share. On the news, shares of Ford jumped close to 2.7% in premarket trading on Tuesday. However, an hour after the announcement, the shares had reversed course and were over 1% lower.
Ford took aggressive actions in restructuring in Europe where the company was losing money. The automaker said it would shutter three of its plants by the beginning of 2014 and says 2013 might be the year it hits bottom in Europe instead of 2014, as was previously forecasted.
For the entire year of 2012, net income for the U.S. automaker was more than $5.7 billion, which was $307 million lower than 2011. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012 was over $36.51 billion, which was $1.9 billion higher than the same quarter one year ago. Revenue for 2012 was at $134.31 billion, which was down by $2 billion from 2011.
On January 10, Ford announced a doubling of its dividend each quarter. It said on Tuesday it would make payments to profit sharing to close to 45,800 hourly workers in the U.S. on March 14. That is for part of the company’s contract with the United Auto Workers. Those payments will amount to an average of about $8,300 for each worker who worked a full year but will vary according to how many hours each employee worked.
