Ford Motor Company is an American
multinational automaker headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of
Detroit. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16,
1903. The company sells automobiles and commercial vehicles under the
Ford brand and luxury cars under the Lincoln brand. In the past it has
also produced heavy trucks, tractors and automotive components. Ford
owns small stakes in Mazda of Japan and Aston Martin of the United
Kingdom. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is controlled
by the Ford family, although they have minority ownership.
Ford
introduced methods for large-scale manufacturing of cars and
large-scale management of an industrial workforce using elaborately
engineered manufacturing sequences typified by moving assembly lines; by
1914 these methods were known around the world as Fordism. Ford's
former UK subsidiaries Jaguar and Land Rover, acquired in 1989 and 2000
respectively, were sold to Tata Motors in March 2008. Ford owned the
Swedish automaker Volvo from 1999 to 2010. In 2011, Ford discontinued
the Mercury brand, under which it had marketed entry-level luxury cars
in the United States since 1938.
Ford
is the second-largest U.S.-based automaker and the fifth-largest in the
world based on 2010 vehicle sales. At the end of 2010, Ford was the
fifth largest automaker in Europe. Ford is the eighth-ranked overall
American-based company in the 2010 Fortune 500 list, based on global
revenues in 2009 of $118.3 billion. In 2008, Ford produced 5.532 million
automobiles and employed about 213,000 employees at around 90 plants
and facilities worldwide.