Ford’s quarterly sales in China down 22%, Argo AI lays off 150 workers

Yahoo Finance autos correspondent Pras Subramanian details the decline in Ford's Chinese quarterly sales and Argo AI's announced layoffs and hiring slowdowns amid recession fears.

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- Ford sales stalling in China, down more than 20% in the second quarter alone. Senior autos reporter Pras Subramanian here with the implications here. Pras, it is bad. Not as bad as it was for GM, though, in China in that same quarter. All presumably related to COVID.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, those COVID shutdowns really affecting both GM and Ford. GM sales down 35% in Q2. Ford down, like you said, 22%. Not really good there. It's been the worst quarter, again, since the pandemic began in Q1 of 2020. But they did note that June sales were perking up a little bit, up 3% year over year, up 38% month over month. And we have a quote here from the Ford-- from Ford's China head talking about how, "Ford's business recovery in China is proceeding at a full speed as vehicle production has reached pre-pandemic capacity and customer traffic at our dealerships has progressively improved."

So we are seeing a little bit of silver lining here, though we have seen that certain parts of China are still locking down. There's still some districts that are actually restricting movement. So it's still not over yet in China, just over in certain areas where the cars are being produced.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And I want to ask you about the tech layoff contagion. Obviously, we're still talking about Ford here. But Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle tech startup, it's backed by Ford and VW. They're laying off 150 people and slowing hiring. Are we starting to see some of these car companies suffer the same way as tech companies?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, you know, that good jobs report really not helping Argo here and some of the-- maybe some high-flying tech, right? So Argo AI is a Ford-backed autonomous driving company. They laid off about 5% of their staff in an announcement today. You know, TechCrunch was reporting that insiders had thought the company had grown too fast based on the hiring that they had done.

But, you know, the company is still in some-- it's still operating in places like Miami and Austin, Texas. They're still trying to, kind of, you know, solve that puzzle of autonomous driving, which is really difficult. And we saw Tesla also two weeks ago laying off a bunch of people in their autopilot division because, you know, maybe this technology is sort of trying too hard to push forward when it really has a lot to solve and there's still a lot of money to be invested. And right now, we're seeing with the economy and things like that in the auto industry a little bit of retrenchment there, too.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: So you're seeing that blurring of the lines between what is a tech company and a car company these days. A big thank you to our senior auto reporter Pras Subramanian.