The Times - UK (2022-01-01)

the times | Saturday January 1 2022 2GM 51

Business

A City grandee who has chaired
FTSE 100 companies including BT,
Rio Tinto and SABMiller has been
recognised for his 17 years at the top of
the corporate ladder with a knighthood
in the new year honours.
Jan du Plessis, 67, is rewarded not
only for his wider contribution to busi-
ness but also for “services to telecom-
munications”, even though his recent
retirement from BT after only four
years in the role left some investors
feeling short-changed.
The South African-born du Plessis,
who has dual citizenship, is about to
take up the chairmanship of the
Financial Reporting Council, the board
standards and accounting regulator
and a government appointment.
His distinguished career, during
which he has mentored senior female
business leaders, is somewhat marred
by his spell as a non-executive director
of Lloyds TSB, during which the board
approved the catastrophic acquisition
of HBOS in 2008.
The leading businesswoman in the
list is Vivienne Cox, independent non-
executive director and workforce
engagement director at GlaxoSmith-

MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

vehicle volumes in

Europe have been flat at

678,000 for a reduced

market share of 6.5 per

cent. The 10,000 sales of

its £40,000 Mustang

Mach-E electric car put

third-quarter revenue

20 per cent ahead at

$18.7 billion, but the

business is barely

profitable.

The company is also

adopting the “volume is

vanity, profit is sanity”

dictum. A Ford

spokesman said: “You

can’t put volume or

market share per se in

the bank. What we’re

creating is a sustainable

profitable Ford of

Europe business,”

adding that the company

planned to invest in a

“move into our

electrified future”.

which is also sold in an

electric version. The

Mondeo is due to be

axed this year.

The semiconductor

crisis and electrification

have come as Ford aims

to catch up with the

swing to sports utility

vehicles in the past

decade.

“We have prioritised

newer products like

Puma and Kuga and

consequently have sold

less of our traditional

models like Fiesta and

Focus,” a Ford

spokesman said, adding

that 64 per cent of

Ford’s passenger vehicle

sales in Europe in the

third quarter were SUVs.

Europe has long been

the loss-making sick

man of Ford. In the first

nine months of 2021,

British sales pitch has

long gone after the

closure of the

Dagenham car plant and

switch of production of

the last UK model, the

Fiesta, to Spain in 2002.

In the past decade the

rise of personal contract

purchase plans, in which

the key financial figure

is not the recommended

retail price but the

monthly payment over

three years, has made

more expensive cars

such as Germany’s

BMW, Audi and

Mercedes-Benz much

more affordable.

In 2021, the Ford

Focus has fallen out of

the top ten UK

bestselling cars and the

Fiesta has fallen below

a host of rivals, led by

the Vauxhall Corsa,

drivers of the mid-

market Mondeo model

as the key voters that

Labour would have to

win over in the 1997

election.

By the turn of the

century, more than

16 per cent of new cars

registered were a Ford,

which had annual UK

sales of 400,000.

In the past 20 years,

the Fiesta and the Focus

have remained

Britain’s bestselling

cars, but the buy-

in Britain last year for

more than 9 per cent of

the market.

In 2019, before the

pandemic, Ford was

selling twice as many

cars as it did in 2021.

Five years ago, when the

UK new car market was

at a pre-Brexit high,

Ford sold 320,000 new

cars, capturing 12 per

cent of all sales.

Ford has been at the

top of British motor

retailing since the 1970s,

when the Cortina was

joined by the Escort as

Britain’s biggest-selling

cars. By the early 1980s

with the launch of what

was to become Britain’s

bestselling car, the

Fiesta hatchback, more

than 30 per cent of new

cars sold in the UK

was a Ford.

Its factories at

Dagenham and

Halewood

made buying

a Ford

“buying

British”.

British Leyland,

its main rival,

was imploding

F

ord has been

toppled from its

five-decade

dominance of

Britain’s new

car market (Robert Lea

writes). Moreover, as it

trails its rivals in the

transition to becoming

an all-electric car

company in Europe —

Ford has only one zero-

emission vehicle on the

road — it seems that the

American group may

never regain its British

market leadership.

Forty years ago, one in

three cars sold in the

UK was a Ford and two

decades ago it still

enjoyed market pre-

eminence, with one in

six new cars a Ford.

When the tally for 2021

comes in, however, the

group is likely to have

sold about 120,000 new

cars in the UK for a

market share of a little

over 7 per cent.

The title of Britain’s

favourite car brand goes,

for the firt time, to

Volkswagen. The

German manufacturer

sold about 150,000 cars

Ford runs out of road

as VW snatches the

prized No 1 sales spot

The Fiesta is popular, but

VW, top left, has overtaken

Ford as top UK car seller, a

title the Cortina, below,

earned it in the 1970s

and the Germans and

Japanese were yet to

gain traction.

Ford’s place in British

culture was cemented

when psephologists

identified “Mondeo

man”,

Du Plessis knighted in new year honours

Kline, the drugs group, and chair-

woman of the Rosalind Franklin Insti-

tute, the national medical research

centre. Cox, 62, is made a dame for

services to sustainability, diversity and

inclusion in business. She worked for BP

for 28 years in senior roles.

New knights include Nigel Wilson,

under whose tenure as chief executive

Legal & General has become Britain’s

first £1 trillion investment manager,

and Ian Livingstone, 72, a founding

father of the UK games industry. He co-

founded Games Workshop in 1975,

launching Dungeons & Dragons in

Europe, and chaired Eidos, where he

secured the Tomb Raider franchise.

William Russell, 56, was elected lord

mayor of the City of London in 2019,

then was re-elected in 2020 because of

the pandemic, becoming the first

person in 150 years to serve two terms.

The appointment as CBE of Ed

Anderson, 71, chairman of National

Savings & Investments, will be seen as a

surprise after a year when savers with-

drew billions from their accounts after it

slashed its rates. Its decision to phase out

paying Premium Bond prizes by cheque

also went down like a lead balloon.

Roger Burnley may no longer be at

the helm of Asda, from which he

resigned in August after a difference of

opinion with its new owners, the

billionaire Issa brothers, but the duo

hailed the “well-deserved recognition”.

The list of CBEs also includes Andy

Cosslett, former InterContinental

Hotels Group chief executive, for his

most recent role as chairman of the

Rugby Football Union, alongside John

Dawson, chief executive of Oxford Bio-

Medica, the company making the

Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and Steve

Murrells, chief executive of the Co-op,

who kept the food supply chain running.

Martin Lewis, the founder of Money-

SavingExpert, who has saved people

thousands with his shrewd financial

advice, was made CBE for services to

consumer rights. The list also includes

Louise Kingham, formerly chief execu-

tive of the Energy Institute, who

recently joined BP as its UK head.

New year honours in full, pages 72-78

Dominic Walsh, Patrick Hosking

Vivienne Cox, who

worked for BP

for 28 years in

senior roles, is

appointed a dame

Sanctions-hit Huawei sees

revenues drop 29 per cent

Annual revenues at Huawei are set to

have fallen by almost a third after the

Chinese technology company was hit

by American export controls.

In an end-of-year letter to its employ-

ees, Huawei said that revenue was

expected to have fallen by 28.9 per cent

to 634 billion yuan (£73.7 billion) last

year, compared with 2020.

Guo Ping, the company’s rotating

chairman, said that Huawei’s attempts

to reshape its business after American

sanctions were imposed were on

course, but he cautioned that “2022 will

come with its fair share of challenges.

An unpredictable business environ-

ment, the politicisation of technology

and a growing deglobalisation move-

ment all present serious challenges.

“We will keep working closely with

our global partners to overcome the dif-

ficulties we face, improve business per-

formance and strengthen our founda-

tions.”

Huawei rose to become one of the

biggest technology companies and the

world’s largest smartphone business in

2020, but it was squeezed by tightening

restrictions in the West, particularly in

the United States amid a wider cooling

in relations and a trade battle.

Last year export controls imposed by

Washington blocked Huawei from ob-

taining critical chips and components,

hitting its mobile business, which has

lost global market share to competitors

including Apple. It also sold Honor, a

smartphone brand.

In 2020 Britain banned the use of

new Huawei equipment for 5G net-

works from the start of 2021 and for ex-

isting technology by the end of 2027.

The clampdown followed pressure

from Washington over concerns, de-

nied by Huawei, that its equipment was

vulnerable to spying by Beijing.

Guo, 55, who joined Huawei in 1988,

said that the results were in line with

the company’s forecasts and were also

an improvement on the third quarter,

when revenues fell by 38 per cent year-

on-year.

Huawei is seeking to shift into new

markets that are less exposed to foreign

supply chains and chips, including soft-

ware and wearable gadgets.

Alex Ralph