Ford Motor reported $1.8 billion in profit for the three months that ended in September, a decline of $600 million from a year earlier that the company attributed mainly to the global shortage of computer chips.
Revenue fell about 5 percent, to $35.7 billion, the automaker said Wednesday. In the same period a year ago, when auto sales were rebounding after a slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Ford earned $2.4 billion on $37.5 billion in revenue.
Ford said its supply of semiconductors had improved markedly from the second quarter, and it forecast further improvement in the fourth, although the tight supply of chips is likely to dog the auto industry for some time.
“I expect the constraints on chips to remain fluid through 2022 and could extend into 2023, but we do expect the severity to reduce,” Ford’s chief financial officer, John Lawler, said in a conference call with reporters.
Despite the shortage of computer chips, Ford increased its earnings outlook for 2021 and said it would resume paying a dividend in the fourth quarter.
Earlier on Wednesday, General Motors, which has also been hampered by the computer chip shortage, reported that its third-quarter profit fell to $2.4 billion from $4 billion in the year-earlier period.
While G.M. was hit harder by the chip shortage than Ford in the third quarter, Ford had greater struggles earlier in the year because one of its key chip suppliers was slowed by a fire at a factory in Japan.
Modern automobiles require dozens of computer chips for a wide range of electronic components such as engine controllers and infotainment systems. Production of automotive chips declined significantly last year during the pandemic, leaving automakers with shortages that have forced them to idle plants for weeks at a time and dealers with slim inventories of new vehicles.
One upside of the shortage is that vehicle prices have risen, increasing profit for the automakers on each truck and car they sell.
In the past, the companies have often built more vehicles than consumers were buying, and at times each had nearly one million cars and trucks sitting on dealer lots waiting to be sold. But Ford said Wednesday that it had a rare backlog of orders totaling more than 100,000 vehicles in the United States. New models drawing interest include the Bronco sport-utility vehicle, the Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle and the F-150 pickup truck.
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