4 ms·
Maybe but there's got to be a less expensive way of doing that. Buying VW's stake?
by jnsie 4y ago
Maybe but there's got to be a less expensive way of doing that. Buying VW's stake?
- threeseed 4y agoI am sure if there was a simpler way Ford would have done it. The obvious reason is that VW either (a) doesn't want to sell it or (b) wants to retain IP.
- bluGill 4y agoI doubt they can buy VW. The German government has an interest and Porsche most of the rest.
- garyfirestorm 4y agoI think he meant buying VW’s stake in Argo AI. Not buying VW itself.
- mock-possum 4y agoI do kinda love that they interpreted it that way though. I’m picturing some coked out Ford exec screaming at his vp of finance “do we or do we have enough money to buy VW??!”
- shjake 4y agoThey don’t. But it’s not like anyone could buy VW it’s partially owned by the state and the trade unions could easily block it. All of that is reflected in VWs share price. Without all this ‘socialism’ VW could probably easily buy Ford itself, maybe even GM.
- shjake 4y agoPorsche is the majority shareholder in VW and VW itself owns 75% of Porsche (100% before the IPO)
- willvarfar 4y agoWait, what?! How can you have cycles in an ownership graph? Ah, answering my own question, it seems to be called "circular ownership" and while it can sometimes occur from a long history of mergers and acquisitions (Samsung seems to be such a case), its generally a tax dodge or to mask ownership? At least, the top hits I see are all talking about it as a classic way to obscure oligarch ownership and things. Genuinely curious who actually gets to make the decisions.
- qznc 4y agoOne important part of the answer is that there are two „Porsches“, a holding and a car manufacturer. It is also complicated though and there is much speculation who has how much influence.
- jeron 4y agoyeah, but what if you can make them hurt and restart the business? sometimes corporate leadership like to do petty things like this at huge cost
- chx 4y agoHuge cost? The board won't fire them for misspending a measly 5% of the their cash hoard. (" Ford Motor cash on hand for the quarter ending December 31, 2022 was $44.070B, a 11.14% decline year-over-year.") They wrote off 7.3B because of Rivian and still no one got fired. What huge cost?
- kryptiskt 4y agoRealizing a loss isn't bad, it only recognizes that money you have already spent is lost, it doesn't actually cost you anything and it's a nice tax write-off. If you can do that and you get to get keep the engineers, why not do that instead of keeping some fictional value for it on your balance sheet?
- zaphirplane 4y agoA company could write off a value or a partial value for an asset. Ford could have done that.