After experiencing a poor earnings report and a 35% drop in its stock price for three years, Ford quickly adjusted its leadership team and promoted Jim Hackett, the head of its auto-pilot subsidiary, to the new leader and fired CEO Mark Fields. Prior to joining Ford, Hackett worked for Steelcase, an office furniture company, for 20 years and successfully led the transformation of the company. Investors now speculate that this personnel decision means that the 104-year-old "old" old car manufacturer intends to change its course and join the auto market, or that it just wants to label itself with some high-tech labels in Silicon Valley. , to save the stock price trend? The cover story of Barron's Weekly said that there is a third possibility to look at things that don't stay on the surface: Ford plans to build an unmanned fleet and move into the lucrative auto-pilot fleet management business. 2030, Fleet Management Business Expected to Earn 220 Billion U.S. Dollars Recently, a report released by Goldman Sachs stated that with the rapid expansion of the shared taxi business, private car owners may increase slowly. Older car manufacturers may begin to produce and manage autonomous driving fleets, and this business can make more money than making cars. Goldman Sachs also predicts in the report that the fleet management business may realize a pre-tax gain of approximately US$14,000 per working cycle, compared with an average automobile manufacturing profit of US$2,000 per vehicle. . Currently, Uber and other shared taxi companies still rely on human drivers in fleet management. However, this situation will change in the future. Goldman Sachs predicts that in 2030, autonomous driving will increase the revenue of the shared taxi market to 285 billion U.S. dollars, of which 220 billion U.S. dollars (equivalent to 77.2% of revenue) will be paid to the fleet management company, not the taxi service company. . Ford car manufacturers like Ford have a lot of resources to compete in this business. They produce cars, can control supply to a certain extent, have long-term experience in car loans, and maintain a network of traders such as vehicle maintenance and storage. Self-driving car or dismantling $7 trillion market Ford urgently needed transformation Autopilot technology has become a new technology that cannot be overlooked in the automotive industry and will continue to suppress the market share and revenue of the traditional auto manufacturing industry. IHS Markit expects that in 2035, the market penetration of highly self-driving cars will reach 32%. The company with the highest market value in the US car market is Tesla. In April this year, Tesla surpassed General Motors to gain this throne. At present, Tesla's stock price has risen to 325.14 U.S. dollars, and the market value has reached 54.55 billion U.S. dollars. By comparison, Ford's share price has fallen to $10.93 and its market value is only $43.52 billion. However, in terms of vehicle output, Tesla is far from GM and Ford, which have the second and third largest market capitalization. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla's current output is only 1% of the general production. Last year, Tesla sold 76,285 cars, GM sold 10 million cars worldwide, and Ford sold 6.65 million cars. This year, Tesla plans to increase its annual production to 500,000 vehicles. At the same time, the sales of American cars are also falling sharply. At the end of last year, the annual sales of light-duty vehicles in North America were 18.4 million, and last month this number fell to 16.8 million. After the official promotion of self-driving cars, it is expected to collapse to 7 trillion US dollars in the market, including car sales, supply, services, in addition, the technology will also have a profound impact on the oil industry and the real estate industry. Giving the baton to Hackett allows him to plan Ford's future development. This means that Ford President Bill Ford Jr. and others have recognized the impact of the automaker's auto-pilot technology, and the impact this impact will have on Ford's development in the future. . In fact, Ford has already begun to touch autopilot technology. Wall Street's previous article mentioned that during Hackett’s leadership of Smart Mobility, Smart Mobility acquired Chariot, a taxi service company, for US$65 million. This service will be integrated into GoBike, which will be launched in 2018. Smart Mobility also acquired SAIPS, an Israeli company, to make progress in machine learning algorithms for driverless cars. During Fields' role as Ford CEO, Ford invested $1 billion in Argo AI, a startup company, to gain access to autopilot software experts. But Ford’s acquisitions dwarf those of competitors such as General Motors and Fiat Chrysler: General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft and acquired Cruise Automation, an unmanned company founded by MIT engineers, for $581 million. Fiat Chrysler supplied 500 Pacifica models to Google’s driverless company Waymo for driverless testing at Waymo. In addition, it is reported that they have also cooperated in the service of unmanned taxis. However, Ford’s traditional automotive manufacturing business still brings huge profits to the company. Wall Street analysts predict that Ford will generate an average of 3.5 billion U.S. dollars of free cash flow per year, which is equivalent to 8% of the market value of its stock market. Ford can not only use this money for autonomous driving technology research, but also can reduce the financing of pensions and other retirement benefits. gap. Survey: More confidence in Ford's stock price than Tesla investors Morgan Stanley's recent survey of investors also showed that if you choose between Ford and Tesla, most investors seem to have more confidence in the former's stock price performance. "Most questionnaire investors stated that Ford's stock price will exceed Tesla in the future. Although many people predict that Tesla Model 3 will be a great success, it is a commercial success, which means that it will be a very good one. The car, but it will not be a car that will bring great profits. Time will tell everything."