Ford may ship Brazil-built vehicles to U.S.

DETROIT, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F - news) is considering shipping vehicles to the United States and Canada from a modern, low-cost factory in Brazil, a move likely to draw fire from its North American labor unions.

Kathleen Ligocki, Ford’s chief of business strategy, outlined the company’s Brazilian options in a wide-ranging speech Wednesday night about the current competitive environment in the U. S. auto industry.

Her remarks – in which she described Ford’s plant in Bahia, Brazil, as a key regional asset for the world’s second- largest automaker – came less than one month after the company announced it was cutting 21,500 North American jobs and closing at least five plants in the United States and Canada as part of a sweeping restructuring program.

Ligocki said the $1.9 billion plant, which opened in October in Camacari, Bahia, will build a series of different vehicles for Ford, including cars and sport utility vehicles.

“It’s a very, very efficient, low-cost plant. It’s going to be our lowest cost plant,” said Ligocki. “And we’re looking at actually trying to bring some of those (Brazilian-built) products. . . we’re going to look at trying to bring some of those to the U. S. and Canada.”

Ligocki gave few details, other than to say the plant, complete with a marine terminal on Bahia’s Aratu Bay, will soon become Ford’s lead facility in Brazil, where it also operates a large manufacturing complex in Sao Paulo.

“I would say that we will more and more depend on Bahia as our lead facility there, particularly for exports,” Ligocki said.

Ligocki did not specify the makes or models of vehicles that Ford plans to build at the plant, where production is currently limited to the Ford Courier, a small pickup.

But a spokeswoman at the company’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters said, “an all new family of vehicles will come from the plant,” which is expected to produce 850 vehicles a day, or about 250,000 a year.

Separately, in an interview in Thursday’s editions of the Detroit Free Press newspaper, Ford’s Chief Operating Officer Nick Scheele all but confirmed a new compact SUV, known as the Fusion, will be built by Ford in Brazil and probably exported to both the U. S. and Canadian markets.

“We need a low cost option in Canada,” Scheele said of the entry-level SUV. “We haven’t yet confirmed it, but no one has told me that we can’t do it. If it works, it would make sense about 2004.”