Word: forde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Honda Accord ever saw a drafting table. Nissan's success gave weight to the myth that Japanese companies were run by enlightened executives who worked in frictionless synchronicity with workers to produce superior cars. In his best-selling book The Reckoning, David Halberstam suggested that U.S. industry, namely the Ford Motor Co., would be consigned to a never-ending game of catch-up with the likes of Nissan, a company driven by the Japanese "demonic need for excellence...
These days Ford is a global predator with a $23 billion war chest and a market value ($34 billion) almost four times as big as Nissan's. Racked by an economy in an eight-year decline, Japan has a demonic need for the cash and expertise of foreign bankers and takeover experts who are buying, at deep discount, chunks of the country's financial and industrial base. "What has really happened this decade is the true inability of the Japanese to manage in a difficult situation," says ING Baring Furman Selz managing director Maryann Keller, who has studied Japanese industry...
...acquire a controlling stake in the world's seventh largest carmaker. Renault could afford it because that week Nissan's stock price had sunk low enough so that a 33.4% share (which counts in Japan as a controlling interest) was worth around $2.8 billion--or barely half of what Ford recently paid for Volvo, the world's 21st largest carmaker...
...simply too burdened to be much more than a headache to anyone. Analysts estimate that its debt nearly doubles when the financial obligations of its many affiliates are thrown in. "We don't want to spend our hard-earned money buying someone else's hard-earned debt," said Ford co-chairman Jacques Nasser not long before he bought Volvo last month. Some top Ford executives were certain last fall that Nissan was worth a serious look, and they went so far as to invite Hanawa to Dearborn. But even before the Japanese executive got there, enough intelligence had come back...
...Preston Tucker's Tucker. Francis Ford Coppola's 1988 retelling of the true story of WWII plane manufacturer Preston Tucker's dream of delivering safe, full-featured cars to the average American (check out that third headlight) is like the car itself: Glitzy, well-made, but with an old chassis underneath. In this case, the old parts come from Citizen Kane, and from Coppola's own back story: Driven man takes on the establishment and gets squashed...