MoneywebDRIVE: Feature
Ford Goes Even Further
In mid-August Ford Motor Company South Africa hosted its
second Go Further Africa conference at the Sandton Convention Centre.
For anyone attending the conference it was impossible not
to feel like cheering Ford’s
achievements here in the past
five years.
The conference was attended by
some 300 people, and is unique
in its scope on the South African
motoring scene as invitees included dealers, sales executives,
a smattering of celebrities and
journalists from both South Africa and the Sub Saharan region,
where Ford is focussing lots of its
energy in the years to come.
In that time, the company’s market share in South Africa has more
than doubled, growing from 7%
to 15%. Its star performer has
been the Ford Ranger pick-up,
which became the first pick-up
to knock the previous best-seller, the Toyota Hilux, off its perch
as the country’s top-selling light
commercial vehicle (LCV).
Part of this focus was the announcement that Ford would be
assembling the new Ranger pickup in Nigeria, from component
kits supplied by the Ford plant in
Silverton, and using engines built
in Port Elizabeth.
In fact, for the first six months of
2015, the Ranger was not only
the top selling LCV, but also the
top-selling vehicle, beating out
the likes of Hilux and Volkswagen’s passenger-market top sellers: the Polo and Polo Vivo.
Ford’s CEO and President of
the Sub Saharan region, Jeff
Nemeth, was in a bullish mood
as he pointed to these successes and the fact that in the
past year Ford has introduced
11 new models. Topping that,
Nemeth and other senior executives hosted sneak previews
on stage of some good stuff to
come from Ford over the next
few months.
MoneywebDRIVE brings you a
glimpse, in the following pages,
of what’s in store as Ford goes
even further towards yearend, and the first few months
of 2016. Elsewhere in this issue
we also publish a review of
the just-launched B-Max, an
eccentric little city-cross-over
Ford that, frankly, leaves us a
little nonplussed.
Jeff Nemeth and the substantially face-lifted Ford Ranger, due here in October
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