Ford, which yesterday posted its 12th straight profitable quarter, is looking to use some of that cash to make upfront pension payments to 90,000 white-collar workers this summer.
The carmaker hopes to lower its $74 billion worldwide pension liability. The payments could amount to roughly $400,000 a pop, or more.
Ford, with 164,000 workers around the world, said the wholesale pension payout is the first offered by any US company.
Ford already has accumulated $9.3 billion in cash this year, and intends to use about $3.8 billion to kick off its buy-out bonanza to 75,000 US employees, its largest single workforce, and thousands others elsewhere, the company said.
“We believe this is the first time a program of this type and magnitude has been done with an ongoing pension obligation,” Ford CEO Alan Mulally told analysts while unveiling first-quarter earnings..
Ford reported a first quarter profit of $1.4 billion, down sharply from its $2.55 billion first-quarter profit a year ago.
The company said it took a bath in Europe operations, which lost $149 million.
CFO Robert Shanks called Europe’s slide the worst since 1995, saying it “is like looking back at the US in 2008 and 2009.”
Meanwhile, Shanks hailed the buyout plan as “a huge step forward in terms of actually eliminating some of the obligations altogether.”
The US pension tab is about $49 billion.
Shanks had no idea how many salaried workers — including a handful of current retirees collecting checks — would accept offers. Union workers aren’t involved in the deal yet, he said.
“This will be done person by person because it’s done with actuarial data around each individual, and how long they might be expected to live — so actually it’s not one rate,” said Shanks. “It’ll be thousands of rates.”
Filings showed Ford pays white collar workers a base pension of about $48 a month, multiplied by the number of years of service. Executives get bumped up to as much as $100 a month or higher, depending on their pay scales.
Mulally, who joined Ford in 2004, has no pension as such, but owns 22 million shares of Ford valued in excess of $265 million.
Veteran executive vice president L.W.K. Booth has a pension pot valued at $13 million based on his 34 years of service, filings said.