Ford still has more room to run in 2022 after a stellar performance last year, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday.
Shares of Ford surged another roughly 10% to more than $24 on the second trading day of the year. They hit a fresh 52-week high — building on Monday’s nearly 5% jump, which followed last year’s 136% increase.
“The sky is the limit for Ford this year. It’s going to be terrific,” Cramer said on “Squawk Box.”
Ford was left for dead on Wall Street before the Covid-19 outbreak, hitting a pandemic low around $4 a share in March 2020. But the automaker got a new CEO in Jim Farley on Oct. 1, 2020 — since then, the stock has more than tripled.
Cramer’s latest optimism around Ford came as the automaker announced plans to nearly double annual production capacity of its upcoming electric F-150 pickup to 150,000 vehicles per year by mid-2023. The “Mad Money” host said he believes Ford can do 200,000 battery-powered vehicles this year.
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“I’ve been a big backer of Ford as part of the charitable trust. Farley has done a remarkable job. He’s ahead of Musk when it comes to the pick-up truck,” Cramer said, referring to Elon Musk’s Tesla, which has repeatedly pushed back production of its planned Cybertruck. It now looks like it won’t start until 2023.
Ford also said Tuesday it restarted reservations for the F-150 Lightning after Farley told Cramer during last month’s “CNBC Investing Club” special that reservations had to be paused due to high demand.
In a November interview in Automotive News, Farley said Ford plans to increase EV production capacity to 600,000 units globally by 2023.
Cramer said Tuesday the Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV “does make a lot of money.” He added that Farley “doesn’t like to make things that don’t make money.”
Last month, Ford said it expects to triple the output of the Mach-E to over 200,000 units per year by 2023.
But Ford has a long way to go to achieve those lofty Mach-E and F-150 Lightning goals. For all of last year through November, Ford sold just 24,791 Mach-Es.
By contrast, Tesla delivered a record 936,172 electric vehicles last year. That’s an 87% increase versus 2020, when the EV-maker reported its first annual profit on deliveries of 499,647.
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