Hindustanis.Org

US automaker Ford has agreed to sell its luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors for more than $2 billion, according to a sources. The figure is much less than Ford originally paid for either of the brands.

Ford has been looking to sell Jaguar and Land Rover to strengthen finances after losing $2.7 billion last year and $12.6 billion in 2006.

Ford, which signed the deal on Tuesday, plans to publicly announce the transaction in New York on Wednesday, said another source.

The deal will also see Ford pay about $598 million into Jaguar and Land Rovers’ pension funds, according to unions. Ford declined to comment, adding “our first responsibility is to communicate with our employees.”

The sale had been expected at the start of this month, but it was delayed as the two firms discussed their future relationship, including technology sharing and Ford’s provision of engines and body parts for the two brands.

Tata, India’s top vehicle maker, has been in talks with Ford since it was chosen as the frontrunner to buy Jaguar and Land Rover a few days into 2008.

Tata is pursuing the deal to gain a substantial foothold outside India. But analysts have questioned how Tata will incorporate the luxury brands into its stable of sturdy trucks and functional passenger cars, including the Nano, the world’s cheapest car which it unveiled in January.

While Land Rover has generated three years of record sales with its iconic SUVs, the fit of Jaguar is far less clear. Ford, which lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion in 2006, is spinning off Jaguar and Land Rover to focus on turning around its loss-making operations in North America.

The sale will include a commitment by Tata to continue buying engines from Ford, according to unions.

All Jaguar and Land Rover’s petrol engines are built in a Ford plant in South Wales, supporting hundreds of jobs there. Diesel engines come from Ford’s factory in Dagenham, east London.

One of the sources knocked down reports on Indian television earlier on Tuesday that the deal had been closed for $2.65 billion.

“That figure of $2.65 billion is highly unlikely,” one source close to the deal said of the report.

“You have to come south from that by quite a bit.” Ahead of the TV report, shares in Tata Motors rose 2.7 percent to a three-week closing high of 679.95 rupees, in a Mumbai market that surged 6.1 percent. Ford shares were down 0.2 percent at around $5.95 at 1813 GMT.

Amid a flurry of new product announcements, AMD took plenty of time during its annual meeting with New York financial analysts to flagellate itself over the manufacturing problems that made this a year it would rather forget.

The errata problems with the Quad-Core Opteron were front and center, as was the write-down of ATI assets announced yesterday. While the company did talk about 2008 shipment plans and a number of new processors and platforms, including a new eight-core processor, 2007’s financial problems dominated.

“We made some mistakes — shame on us — but with the success we had for four years of nearly flawless execution, we’ve done well,” said Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. “I have to say, looking back, we fell into complacency in one area: the difficulty and unpredictability of this increasingly complex technology we are building. So we blew it, we are very humbled by it and we are not going to do it again.”

He also expressed a little dissatisfaction with the low stock price, which many in the audience could do something to help change if they wanted.

“How can anyone conclude our company is worth 40 percent less today than it was a few weeks ago?” he asked.

President and Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer added that AMD has done a lot of things “very well” this year, but “we have done one thing very poorly. Namely, we haven’t delivered our quad-core product.”

The company denied claims that it stopped shipment of the Quad-Core Opteron due to the errata problem and said it’s currently spinning up new chips at its Dresden manufacturing facility that fix the problem. It will check those chips in January and begin volume shipments after that. Computers from OEM partners and system builder are expected in the second quarter.

For now, Meyer said he is “maniacally focused on being cash-flow neutral. We don’t want to have to go back to the market to borrow money,” he said, a reference to the 8.1 percent stake the company sold to a United Arab Emirates investment firm.

The company said it expects to break even in the second quarter of 2008 and be profitable beginning in third quarter.

The company also discussed “Montreal,” its first octal-core server processor, which will ship in 2009 along with AMD’s first server platform, codenamed “Piranha.” That platform will feature a new server chipset and HyperTransport 3.0 and support DDR3 memory.

The company also detailed its first notebook platform, called “Shrike.” Shrike is based on AMD’s first accelerated processing unit (APU), dubbed “Swift.”

The APU idea is a combination of a CPU and other processors in one core, such as CPU and GPUs. Swift, accordingly, combines CPU and GPU technology on a single processor die. AMD plans to begin shipping both Swift and Shrike during the second half of 2009.

The company also said it is on schedule to ramp up its 45nm production in first half of 2008, with products in market during second half of 2008. It also said it would reach 32nm in 2010, thanks to its partnership with IBM, which recently announced plans to offer 32nm production capabilities to processor designers.

AMD executives also described moving to a 55nm process for the company’s graphics processors and said it had made a number of wins in the notebook space, which will begin showing up in products starting next year.

In the consumer electronics space, AMD said it sees opportunities in LCD TVs, which continue to grow in popularity. It plans to release new MPEG video processors in 2008 for the HDTV market. It will also release new 2D and 3D graphics chips for the handset market.

Source - InternetNews