Earnings Call Transcript - F Q4 2022

Operator, Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jason, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Ford Motor Company Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Lynn Antipas Tyson, Executive Director of Investor Relations.

Lynn Antipas Tyson, Executive Director of Investor Relations

Thank you, Jason, and welcome to Ford Motor Company's fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. With me today are Jim Farley, our President and CEO; and John Lawler, our Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us for Q&A is Marion Harris, CEO of Ford Credit. Today's discussion includes some non-GAAP references. These are reconciled to the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures in the appendix of our earnings deck. You can find the deck along with the rest of our earnings materials and other important content at shareholder.ford.com. Today's discussion also includes forward-looking statements about our expectations. Actual results may differ from those stated. The most significant factors that could cause actual results to differ are included on Page 24. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year-over-year. Company EBIT, EPS and free cash flow are on an adjusted basis and product mix is volume weighted. I want to call out a few near-term key IR engagements. On February 15, Jim Farley and John Lawler will participate in a fireside chat in New York with Rod Lash at the Wolf Global Auto, Autotech and Mobility Conference. On March 23, at the New York Stock Exchange, we will hold a teach-in about our new Ford+ segment reporting. This event featuring John Lawler and Kathy O'Callaghan, our Controller, will be webcast. And I'm also pleased to share that our next Capital Markets Day will be Monday, May 22, at our headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Please save the date. We'll have more information about this over the coming weeks. Now I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Jim Farley, President and CEO

Thanks, Lynn, and hello, everyone. We appreciate you all joining us. I'll start by addressing the obvious. Our fourth quarter and full year financial performance last year fell short of our potential. And while we generated record cash flow, we left about $2 billion of profit on the table due to costs, particularly continued supply chain issues. These are the simple facts and to say I'm frustrated is an understatement because the year could have been so much more for us at Ford. Now I know the question you must be asking: why Ford, with that incredible product lineup and all the restructuring overseas, aren't you delivering higher profits and more competitive margins? And it's the right question. While we're making progress, it's hard work. As with any transformation of this magnitude, certain parts are moving faster than I expected and other parts are taking longer. The first part of our transformation is to completely overhaul our industrial system, product development, manufacturing and supply chain management to deliver better cost and quality. This is critical because it provides the foundation for everything else we do. It funds our future, our second transformation, which we're aggressively building today. Building incredible new growth businesses like Model e and of course, Ford Pro are huge bets on commercial vehicles, which will be high growth, high margin, not just products but also a software and services business. The second transformation, the growth part, is going better than I imagined. At this point in our journey, I did not expect to be number two in EV sales in the U.S. I didn't know that Lightning would be completely sold out. And I didn't predict that BlueCruise would be the best hands-free autonomy system in the market or that Ford Pro software sales would be growing off the charts. And that doesn't even touch all the incredible next-generation EVs and software platforms that will soon be entering the market. Bottom line, in a double transformation, we have to significantly improve our costs and our quality, but at the same time, grow to fulfill that huge promise in Ford+. And frankly, the first part of the transformation has not moved fast enough. Now this is what we should be known for. It's our legacy, and it will show we can do it again. We have deeply entrenched issues in our industrial system that have proven tough to root out. Candidly, the strength of our products and revenue has masked this dysfunctionality for a long time. It's not an excuse, but it's our reality, and we're dealing with it urgently. Over the past year, we have made sweeping leadership changes and brought in world-class talent to reenergize and rebuild a leading industrial organization. We've committed company-wide to implement a lean operating system that will scrub billions of dollars of waste out of our company. And we are shining the light on every inch of our legacy business with the knowledge that we must do better every day. This has been humbling for both me and our team. That said, I've never been more convinced about our plan. I cannot wait to get into work every day because I'm so optimistic about our plan and what we are creating here at Ford. Now, I respect our competition, but I would not trade places with anyone. Why? Because we have a real strategy to grow. We have incredible products, both on the road and the ones you haven't seen in the pipeline. And I believe we now have a world-class leadership team made up of new and existing talent, ready to compete and win. These strengths will shine through. Ultimately, the proof will be in our results. That's exactly how it should be. We appreciate those who place their faith in Ford, and we are committed to creating value for all of our stakeholders. So with that, let me quickly cover some areas of focus. First, we remain committed to disciplined capital allocation. You saw this in the actions we took in Brazil and India and most recently in Argo. South America and IMG are healthy and generating sustainable profits. This work is never done and will continue to be our focus going forward. Our balance sheet and liquidity remain strong, and our ability to generate free cash flow has really improved significantly. This is allowing us to accelerate our investment in growth, of course, electrification, but also Pro and software, while importantly returning capital to our shareholders. We have now created three distinct customer-facing business segments: Blue, e and Pro, which have given us greater clarity and insights into each of these businesses and how we can improve each of them uniquely. So let me cover a couple of highlights. I'm going to start with Pro, my favorite, the not-so-secret weapon at Ford. Ford Pro embodies all of our growth levers and capitalizes on our commercial vehicle sales leadership and scale to build a world-class ecosystem that delivers great value to our customers and profitable growth for us at Ford. In North America, our vehicle share is almost twice that of our closest competitor. In Europe, Ford has been the number one commercial vehicle brand for eight years in a row. Let me bring this point home. Here in North America, in the whole market, Super Duty, our most important Pro vehicle, owns half the mining business, half the emergency response business, and half the utility business. The requirements for all these customers are complex; they're not going to commoditize, and they require a partner who deeply understands these unique businesses and is dedicated to providing a mix of vehicles and services that can improve uptime and total cost of ownership. We know these customers will pay for software that will enhance their productivity. Moving to Blue, the team is focused and has delivered the freshest and most appealing product lineup in our industry. We know that typically, the fresher the ICE portfolio, the greater the pricing power. Our decision to move away from commoditized utilities to vehicles like Bronco Sport, the Big Bronco, the Maverick, and hybrid powertrains has really paid off. Ford gained nearly one point of market share here in the U.S. last year. We expect 2023 to be another big, strong year of share growth. Ford Blue is a growth business for the foreseeable future with strong profits and robust free cash flow. An F-Series was America's best-selling truck for 46 consecutive years now, outselling its second-place competitor by more than 140,000 trucks. We are launching even new pickups like the new Ranger here in North America and in South America after we've already launched the new Ranger in Asia and Europe last year. In addition, Blue is going after billions in cost improvements from engineering to manufacturing to our bill of material. Quality, however, has work to do. Ford has been number one in recalls in the U.S. for the last two years. Clearly, that's not acceptable. We've overhauled our entire enterprise quality operating system. We are already seeing improvements in initial quality for vehicles coming out of our plants here in North America. Model e is operating with a startup intensity to build profitable EVs with differentiated industry-leading portfolios that customers are going to love. In the U.S., our EV sales growth is twice the rate of the EV segment, and more than 60% of our Model e customers are new to Ford. The F-150 Lightning has been America's best-selling electric pickup since it launched. The Mustang Mach-E remains a huge hit for our customers. We remain on track to reach our annualized EV production capacity of 50,000 units per month or 600,000 units globally by the end of this year. For reference, in the fourth quarter, our run rate of production was more like 12,000. So 50,000 is a significant growth, and we are on plan for that 2 million units of incremental capacity by the end of 2026. To deliver this incredible growth, as we speak, we are adding shifts, expanding our facilities, and building out battery capacity and assembly capacity. Construction is in full swing in Tennessee and Kentucky on our BlueOval City and our three BlueOval SK battery plants. In Europe, we're moving ahead with a new commercial vehicle battery facility in Turkey. Critical to our plan is securing the necessary raw materials for these batteries to achieve that 2 million unit rate, especially lithium and lithium hydroxide and nickel. We expect to have 100% of the raw materials we need for the 2 million unit run rate secured by the end of this year. We are deep in the development of our second-generation EVs, including our next-generation electric full-size pickup, which, by the way, is fantastic. These EVs will be fully software-updatable. That means a brand-new electric architecture, and they're going to be radically simplified. Imagine three body styles, each with volume potential of up to 1 million units and just a handful of orderable combinations. That's what we're doing at Ford for the second generation of products. This means higher customer satisfaction, better quality, lower bill material and lower manufacturing costs. When we start reporting these new segments in the fourth quarter, you're going to have complete visibility in the Model e's margin trajectory and understand the key levers to achieve our Model EBIT target of 8%. We're already making the customer buying experience better with less friction. This will accelerate when the new Model e dealer program takes effect in January next year. This program has been adopted by nearly two-thirds of our 3,000 U.S. dealers and is based on a radical redesign of our customer experience. Next January, we'll be selling EVs at high volume with virtually no inventory, a simple e-commerce platform for our customers, a non-negotiated price set by the local dealer, and remote pickup and delivery for all customer experiences. I've said before that software and experiences will be the key differentiator for our industry. I mentioned earlier that BlueCruise, our driver assist hands-free technology, was just tested by consumer reports and was judged the best hands-free autonomous system on the market. Let that sink in for a moment: the best on the market. If you have not experienced BlueCruise, I challenge you to do a side-by-side comparison with our two major competitors. At the end of last year, our customers using BlueCruise have now traveled 42 million hands-free miles. We're scaling incredibly rapidly. That's a fourfold increase in the millions of miles since the second quarter of last year. We have incredible software talent, making this system better every day, including those 600 former Argo engineers who are now working full-time at Ford on our autonomous systems. Before I hand it over to John, just a few things. Ford is a different company today. We're all about building a stronger, customer-focused business that generates sustainable, profitable growth and returns above the cost of capital. While our 2022 results fell short of my expectations, I've never been more excited about our future because we have the right plan, the right structure to succeed, the best team on the field, and real strategic clarity. This year is about execution. It's time for us to deliver, and we will, with relentless attention to our founding principles, drift and growth. We are hitting the ground running. John?

John Lawler, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jim. As Jim pointed out, our performance in 2022 was below our expectations, and our industrial platform is frankly not where we need it to be. The simple way I measure this is by looking at our cost of goods sold as a percentage of revenue and comparing it to our competition. We're much higher, and this speaks to the significant operating deficits we have in product development, manufacturing, and procurement. This is no different from the tough capital allocation choices we made on our geographic footprint and product portfolio. Choices are designed to yield higher quality growth and improved returns. We are applying the same level of discipline to our industrial platform with urgency. Now, on the positive side, our product portfolio has never been stronger. Our new vehicles are a hit with our customers. Our iconic vehicles remain market leaders, and we continue to make strategic capital allocation decisions to drive growth, strengthen our competitive position, and produce returns above our cost of capital. So turning to the year, we generated a record $9.1 billion in free cash flow, well above our cash conversion target of 50% to 60%. Importantly, most of the free cash flow came from the automotive business, reflecting more disciplined capital allocation, including the restructuring of our operations outside of North America, which until recently was a significant source of cash burn. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we ended the year with $32 billion of cash and $48 million of liquidity. This, coupled with the improvement in free cash flow, provides us with ample flexibility to fund our growth and return capital to our shareholders. In fact, today, we declared our first quarter regular dividend of $0.15 per share as well as a supplemental dividend of $0.65 per share, reflecting our strong free cash flow and the monetization of our Rivian stake, which is now nearly complete. Going forward, we intend to target distribution of 40% to 50% of free cash flow, consistent with our focus on total shareholder return. For the year, we delivered $10.4 billion in adjusted EBIT with a margin of 6.6%. As Jim said, by better executing the things we control, we should have generated as much as $2 billion more in adjusted EBIT. For example, the instability of our supply chain and production plans caused us to not only deliver lower-than-planned volumes in the fourth quarter but also incur higher costs through premium freight and other supplier charges. Let me give you a quick overview of how our 2022 segments performed recognizing that beginning with our first quarter 2023 results, we will no longer have the automotive segments with regional breakouts. North America delivered $9.2 billion of EBIT, an improvement of $1.8 billion, driven by higher net pricing and increased volume, which was partially offset by higher commodity and other inflation-related cost increases. EBIT margin was 8.4%. We continue to maintain a healthy order bank, and the team is busy preparing the launch of the all-new Super Duty and our seventh generation Mustang later this year, both of which are incredible products. In South America, we delivered a profit of over $400 million, and the region is now derisked and sustainably profitable. In Europe, we were slightly above breakeven for the year, but as our fourth quarter results showed, clearly below our target. Given the changing macroeconomic and demand environment in Europe, we will make the changes necessary to deliver a sustainable business that consistently generates returns above our cost of capital. Our core strength in the region continues to be our leading commercial vehicle business. In China, we posted a loss of about $600 million driven by increased investment in EVs. Lincoln continues to be our profit pillar in the region, but clearly, we have more work to do to ensure our business is growing sustainably and delivering appropriate returns. Our International Markets Group earned more than $600 million driven by the launch of the Ranger and our decision to exit India. Similar to South America, the region is now primed for sustainable profitability. Ford Credit had another solid year, delivering EBT of $2.7 billion, which was down $2.1 billion from the prior year reflecting lower credit loss and lease residual reserve releases, lower financing margin, and lower lease return rates. Given the continued uncertainties in the macro environment, I want to provide some context to how we're thinking about 2023. For the full year, we expect to earn $9 billion to $11 billion in adjusted EBIT; that assumes a SAR of 15 million units in the U.S. and 13 million units in Europe. We expect to generate adjusted free cash flow of about $6 billion, with capital expenditures to be between $8 billion to $9 billion. Our adjusted EBIT guidance includes various headwinds and tailwinds that we believe could impact our business in the coming year. When considering the headwinds, they include an expected mild recession in the U.S. and a moderate recession in Europe, higher industry incentives as supply and demand come back into balance. Ford Credit EBT is expected to be about $1.3 billion, which is about $1.4 billion lower than in 2022 reflecting unfavorable lease residual and credit losses and the non-reoccurrence of derivative gains. We expect a continued strong dollar and about $2 billion lower past service pension income. We will continue investments in growth, including in customer experience, connected services, and CapEx as we build out our growth plan. Tailwinds include improvements in supply chain and industry volume, the launch of our all-new Super Duty, and lower costs of goods sold including efficiencies in materials, commodities, logistics, and other parts of our industrial platform. Before taking questions, let me briefly touch on our new financial reporting and plans for our next Capital Markets Day. On March 23, we'll hold a teach-in at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm excited about this opportunity because it will be our chance to take you through how the new Ford+ segments will alter our financial reporting. The changes will include how revenue, cost products, and assets are assigned to each segment. At the teaching, we'll also share our recast financials for both 2021 and 2022. We hope many of you will join us at the New York Stock Exchange in person, but we will also broadcast a live webcast and will post a toolkit and other materials to orient you around all the materials and help you migrate your models. The teaching will not be a strategic update; that will come at our Capital Markets Day in Dearborn in May, when we'll update you on our Ford+ strategy. We'll do a deep dive into financial targets and KPIs for each of our new segments, as well as for software and services. This new level of transparency, which will be tracked and validated in our earnings materials and SEC filings, will better equip investors to value how each of our customer-focused segments is contributing to Ford's overall growth and return profile. As Jim mentioned earlier, 2023 is a pivotal year for Ford. We have the plan, the talent, and the product portfolio in place to take the Company to an exciting new level, one that is both differentiated from our past performance and our competitors. Going forward, our new segmentation will provide unprecedented levels of transparency and insight into all aspects of our business, making it easier to hold Ford leadership accountable for delivering superior growth and value for all of our stakeholders. That wraps up the prepared remarks, and we will use the balance of the time to address what's on your mind. Thank you, and operator, please open up the line for questions.

Operator, Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Adam Jonas, Analyst

I appreciate the humility and the self-criticism about the cost and execution shortfall. It's kind of refreshing to see that. But when you begin the description about it and how frustrated you are, Jim, and how it's not good enough, I was getting all excited to hear some details, and there's just not a lot here. I'm just going to say, it's not a lot of details at all about what exactly the problem is and what you're doing about it and how much you're going to get better this year. You can disagree if you want; that is my impression. I want to know what it is, and because $2 billion on the table, frankly, that's 130 basis points of margin. I mean that's going to go to the consumer anyway. So tell us that's just the beginning, and there’s way more to go. Do we have to wait until May for that? Or is there anything else you can tell us to help model the Company in the year ahead and what you're doing about it? I appreciate it.

Jim Farley, President and CEO

No, there is a lot more to go. The industrial system at Ford is a huge opportunity for us. We have spent the last several months really getting deep on where we need to go. John, maybe you could share or feel comfortable sharing it, but you're going to hear a drumbeat from Ford on this all during the year.

John Lawler, Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So Adam, I think if you just step back and look at the three elements of the industrial platform, there's opportunities across each. If you look at our product development system and our engineering, the level of productivity that we have, think about $1 of input and what you get out for that $1 of input is probably about 25% to 30% inefficient. We should be either getting more products through the pipeline, or our cost should be significantly lower. We have to be very smart about how we go about doing that because we've got incredible products in the pipeline, and there's a huge opportunity on that front, but we also have to balance the quality as well. When it comes to our engineering, I think you should think about it that way, and that's what we're going after. Our supply chain has issues; it cost us at least $1 billion in premiums. That was due to increased freight premiums on chips and disruption that we called our suppliers, because our schedule stability was probably worst in class. Fixing that and getting to the root cause will drive incredible opportunities for us. If we look at our manufacturing system and go through our plants, the level of working capital we have in place, our production schedules, the complexity and the time it takes us to build a vehicle, we understand just how inefficient that is. Those are just a few of the areas we're targeting./

Jim Farley, President and CEO

And Adam, I'd just like to add as the CEO, there are a lot of choices, and they are all very consequential when it comes to the approach and how to do this. The most important thing for me is sustainability. When you look at Ford, we have cut in the past and it grows back or have cut everywhere and not really focused on the industrial system. So for me, the approach that we're taking that's very different and quite difficult is this has to be daily work: gaps to competition, countermeasures, action plans for those countermeasures, constant evaluation of the effectiveness of those countermeasures, and celebration of those KPIs. It has to be a more fundamental approach than holding our breath or dealing with the outputs as people and getting into real industrial systems efficiency. This is a cultural change as a leader; it’s a behavioral change. It is not just a program.

John Murphy, Analyst

I just wanted to follow up on a similar vein, short-term and long-term. Just for short-term, when we think about the 2023 outlook and you look at the $1 billion for decline in Ford Credit and take that as a reasonably given number, something in that direction, and then $2 billion of lower past service pension income. That's a $3.4 billion headwind. But at the midpoint of the range, you're talking about EBIT being roughly flat. So that sort of indicates a very significant $3 billion plus improvement in the core business, which is a lot to believe when you're looking at sort of the headwinds and the issues that you've just faced. I'm just curious if you can comment on that; maybe kind of walk us through how we get comfortable with seeing a $3 billion plus improvement in the core business this year and how you get these supply chain issues fixed when some of that is a bit outside of your control.

John Lawler, Chief Financial Officer

Yes. Thanks, John, that's a great question. That's exactly it. The headwinds will be $4.5 billion to $5 billion as we've pointed out. We said we expect on the tailwinds pricing to be about neutral. Market forces are going to drive average transaction prices down, probably around 5%, which will be some from the dealer margins, but also from higher incentives. We think we do have the new Super Duty to come, and we expect that to be positive, while we also maintain a very strong order bank on our commercial vehicles. The rest of it will fall into cost reductions, and that's correct. When you look at those cost reductions, we also have significant opportunities in our material costs and several ongoing initiatives to identify those efficiencies. We also have quite a bit of cost related to schedule stability. I don't have the exact data from the competition, but I look at our scheduled stability, and there are significant opportunities through changes that we can take to improve that stability, which will flow straight through to the lower surcharges from the supply base. We are also facing significant premiums that we paid for increased freight to just try to keep plants going and keep our suppliers' plans going. That is how we're thinking about it, and that is how we're going about it.

John Murphy, Analyst

Okay, that's incredibly helpful. And just on the long term, you mentioned, Jim, about scrubbing things foundationally and really getting to some costs there; excess. As we look around the world, Europe has had fits and starts making us all kind of excited that it's going to work, and then it doesn't. From time to time. And China, you kind of have been chasing competition there, and it hasn't really paid out for you. But there are two very important parts of Europe and China that are very strong for you. Commercial vehicle in Europe is incredibly strong. So could we just strip Europe back to pure commercial vehicle, and could China just strip back to pure Lincoln? Two places we know you're making money and cut out the other stuff so that you can actually fund the transition that you're talking about? We've been dancing around this stuff, and you've headed in this direction with the global redesign, but there's real opportunities here to be really profitable.

Jim Farley, President and CEO

No, you hit on it. I'm glad we're getting into some of the strategies. I would think of our China business similar to what we’ve done in South America and IMG: small but profitable, focused. In the past, we've been in China small but focused on everything. Lincoln and our commercial business with JMC is very profitable and an important business, but they must transition to EVs profitably. I don’t think you can be globally successful in the EV business if you don’t compete with the Chinese. We believe China is strategically important for us, but to win there, we have to make those businesses transition profitably to EV. I would think of it as small and focused, more than before. In Europe, we have a great commercial vehicle business that is now getting electrified. We are making that transition now, with a new Ranger, the electric version of one-ton, and Transit. We have a new manufacturing site in Romania that’s scaling up now in commercial. We know what our strengths are in Europe, and we know what we need to do. You won’t have to wait long to hear from us on these things.

Rod Lache, Analyst

I think, John, you said in response to Adam's question that variable costs would come down by at least $1 billion. But at the same time, you're acknowledging that pricing could easily be more than $1 billion negative for a $100 billion North American business with a 5-point average transaction price decline. Can you give us a little more insight into that, and can you provide a few specific KPIs that would demonstrate progress on structural costs that were up another $2 billion in 2022?

John Lawler, Chief Financial Officer

Yes. On the pricing side, we will see broad market transaction prices falling about 5%. Some of that's going to come from dealer margins, of course; it's not all going to come from us. We see pricing for us as being about flattish, and then, on the cost reductions side, we have to show leverage in the business; if we're growing the business, our cost of goods sold should be growing at a much slower pace. We also need to see lower costs per unit, improving margins as we launch new vehicles. To assess design efficiency, we have to benchmark and tear down our vehicles against the competition. This will be key in demonstrating our productivity and efficiency in our engineering process. We will provide more details on those KPIs as we move through the year.

Jim Farley, President and CEO

Some measures I've been thinking about include the number of complex sequencing centers we have, our line-side complexity, the number of parts sitting alongside the line, and our inventory turns inside the plant. On the supplier side, we want transparency down to Tier 3 in our supply chain - it’s important to operationalize better quality and cost. We're looking at the ratio of indirect to direct engineering; that is, how much productive engineering we’re spending and how that relates to customer-facing products. Additionally, we're spending more time on our software platform and managing its complexity.

Rod Lache, Analyst

To put a landmark out there, do you think a year from now will we be looking at structural costs that are up or down, obviously, ex-pension, because you have this $3 billion cost reduction plan? I have a second question, just on Model e.

John Lawler, Chief Financial Officer

Rod, I think it's beyond just structural cost. Our biggest cost element is our material cost. We will continue to invest in our growth-related investments, including software and battery build-outs. Volume will drive manufacturing costs. The structural costs will have both increases and decreases as we will have to invest in growth while managing the complexity of our operations. Our biggest opportunity remains in material cost; it is the largest element of cost on our income statement and where we are most uncompetitive.

Rod Lache, Analyst

Okay, got it. Switching gears on Model e, I want to ask Jim about the 8% margin target. That margin target presumably has some assumptions for where costs will go, but also where pricing is going to go. Considering everyone's aspirations for growth in EVs, do you think you can stand by those pricing assumptions? Put differently, do you think you can sell a $40,000 electric crossover with a 20% gross margin?

Jim Farley, President and CEO

That is a very important question. The reality is we are structuring our portfolio to compete in very specific segments. The crossover is turning out to be the core civic of the EV business. The last thing we want to do is commoditize our products by dropping the price, just look what happened to Henry Ford in the 20s in the early teens. We didn't have to touch the pricing in the offer for Lightning and E-Transit because we picked the right segments. But the real driver of our future profitability on Model e is the second cycle products. We didn’t know when we designed these first three products that our wiring harness for Mach-E was 1.6 kilometers longer than it needed to be, that it was 70 pounds heavier, and that it’s worth $300 a battery. We are now learning a lot, and that second cycle of the product is under development manufacturing with a lot of new talent. I’m very optimistic about our 8% because we are not going to play in the two-row commodity SUV market. We need to play our hand, with our strengths being in commercial vehicles and larger vehicles. We will avoid having too many top ads because that adds significantly to our engineering costs. We want minimum choice for customers, but to design the smallest possible battery for competitive size.

Ryan Brinkman, Analyst

To follow up on that, I heard you mention in the prepared remarks that revenue from software services and charging grew by 70% year-over-year in 2022. You discussed a potential $20 billion market opportunity by 2030, with a target of 33 million connected vehicles in 2028 at the last Investor Day. But have you dimensions what's currently happening with that business or shared interim goals such as the expectations for services revenue or growth in 2023?

Jim Farley, President and CEO

Yes, great question. We're going to see that on Pro first. This year is a breakout year for Pro because we have brand-new products, both core in Europe and the U.S. The highest volume, highest profit vehicles all new. The biggest opportunity in the short term is the after-sales business. Only 10% of our Pro customers currently do business with us, and we hardly do any financing with them. Between financing and parts and service, we have enormous upside in the short term, both very profitable areas of our business. I think of it this way: software is starting to drive a closed loop where the customer wants to do more physical service with us. Our established mobile units, increasingly dedicated dealers, and an extensive commercial customer base due to the utilization of the software contribute to the growth in parts and service. The prognostics, putting predictive failure capabilities into all the vehicles like you see on John Deere and Caterpillar, will drive much larger retention in parts and service. That's the real monetization opportunity in the short term for these services in a product ecosystem.

Operator, Operator

This concludes the Ford Motor Company fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.