Notes From All Over -- The Ford EV Edition -- Part 4 -- September 27, 2021

Tennessee, Kentucky: EV valley? See below. Right-to-work states? Lower taxes? Nicer weather?

Roth IRA: Yahoo!Finance. Spousal Roth IRA. 

So what is it? String instruments or stringed instruments? And then we also have chordophones.

Ford: to build $11.4 billion mega campuses for EVs. Also, WSJ.

• Ford's portion: $7 billion
• partner: SK Innovation (South Korean)
  
• 11,000 new jobs
  
• Kentucky, Tennessee; not Detroit
• Tennessee: battery factory alongside a new truck factory
  
• Blue Oval City 
• the truck site
• 6,000 jobs
  
• to begin producing electric F-series pickups by 2025
• Kentucky: two battery factories
  
• BlueOvalSk Battery Park
• the battery site 
• 5,000 jobs
  
• opening date: 2025
  
• largest manufacturing investment in the company's 118-year-old history
• few new automobile plants have been opened in the US in the last few decades
  
• Volvo: South Carolina
• Detroit: Jeep
  

Ford, statistics from Yahoo!Finance, numbers rounded:

• mega-EV project: $7 billion
• market cap: $50 billion
• enterprise value: $160 billion
• revenue (ttm): $140 billion
• gross profit (ttm): $6 billion
• total cash: $25 billion
• total debt: $150 billion

Comments: many numbers rounded; back-of-envelope figures

• all this talk about auto manufacturers with supply chain problems? Ford is looking past them
• $7 billion / $150 billion or $7 billion / $160 billion = 4 to 6 percent spread out over several years
• $7 billion / $140 billion = 5 percent spread out over several years no dividend since January, 2020; had been 15 cents = 60 cents/share annually
• outstanding shares: 4 billion shares * 60 cents = $2.4 billion / year
• $7 billion / $2.4 billion = three years
• 12,000 employees x $60K / year = $1 billion / year

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about these kinds of things. This is simply my own figuring. If this is important to you, go to the source, and your get your own used envelope.

Others:

• GM: Nashville, a $2.3 billion battery factory to support a nearby assembly plant which itself is getting a $2 billion makeover to make EVs
• Volkswagen AG: Chattanooga, $800 million to expand its EV production

Covid-19:

• Harvard University / MBA business school
• smartest guys on earth
• but, in addition, access to smartest epidemiologists and virologists in the world
• MBA students: 100% vaccinated
• apparently some type of Covid outbreak on the Harvard School of Business campus (separate from the main Harvard campus)
• whatever the outbreak was, Harvard School of Business elected to move all MBA classes online:
• does Harvard know something the CDC doesn't -- like, perhaps the effectiveness of the vaccine?