Mar 31, 2010
Our President on TV — No Fooling!
Anna Kruchowski
Should you be near a television Thursday, the president and CEO of Volvo Cars of North America, Doug Speck, will be on two national business shows discussing the all-new Volvo S60 and the recent stock agreement signing.
- About 10:50 a.m. EDT, he’ll be on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” for a 3-5-minute segment.
- During the noon-1 p.m. hour (we don’t know exactly when), he will be on Bloomberg TV.
I know Thursday is April 1 but, no fooling, Doug is really going to be on national television.
4 Comments
Knowing Volvos for 30 some years..keep em rolling! Only if I could afford one, I’d be in one.
Hi Allen,
We absolutely intend to be around with our cars for long long time.
dan
why would ford jettison volvo? doesn’t make sense.
Hi Chris,
Going back into Ford history, at one point they had something like 22 billion in cash..real cash. Jac Nasser, in fashion with that time, was looking to expand beyond Ford. Volvo was for sale, by AB Volvo, who needed cash. We all thought Chrysler was going to buy us, since we had mild relationships in past years but were surprised when announced that Ford would take Volvo, for 6.2 billion. Most media though that was way too much, but Nasser wanted two things: platform technology for future cars, and access to our safety program. The S80 (P1) was used in Ford 500 and maybe one other car. Later they took our second generation S80 platform (P2) and used it in an even wider range of cars. They also used some of our hybrid technology, from early 1990′s for their emerging hybrid line. So I guess they got their monies worth.
One really smart move was to put Land Rover, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Mercury, and Volvo into a separate business unit: Premier Automotive Group (PAG). This, unlike GM/SAAB kept us at arms length from Ford. In US we never reported to Ford, but to our parent company in Sweden. Ford has done very well under Alan Malloy basically bringing Ford forward in Safety and Environmental care. Gosh, kind of like our core values. I worked with couple of their safety engineers and they were so much Volvo like, we could have plopped them into Gothenburg and no one would know they came from Ford. Really good people.
Anyway, everyone was getting greedy with real estate and we know where that put us. In comes Alan Malloy to get Ford back on track, to be ‘One Ford’. In a sense, as most corporations end up doing, is going back to their core enterprise. They sold off Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, brought Mercury back into Ford, and now sold us. To Ford, it’s a business transaction, to us it’s again concern for our brand with new parents.
As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, we are not a daughter company to Geely Motors but a sister to them and being help by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. They have stated they will keep our headquarters in Sweden, our present manufacturing in Belgium and Sweden but expand heavily into China. China car market will be huge. We presently make S80L (long wheel base) and S40 in China and have been doing business there for about 25 years.
Doug Speck, in his interviews, talked about would Geely and Volvo dealerships be together. No. Volvo will be Volvo and if Geely comes here, that will be a separate company. Volvo’s will be designed, engineered and all that stuff, in Sweden. We will be eating Herring and downing Aquavit for many years forward.
dan