Correct. For a while Ford Europe was generating all the profit and cash that propped up the rest of the company. But back then, the pension reporting rules were the same for US companies as the rest of the world. I don't want to turn this into an accounting discussion but the entire world reports pension expense when the pension is paid. For US companies, they have to accrued pension expense when it is earned, and they have to set aside cash reserves to pay for the pension. This has been the case since the US accounting rules were changed in 1987. This means US companies (especially ones that employs a lot of highly skilled people for a long time like Boeing, Ford, GM, GE etc) are saddled with a lot of extra expenses and is required to restrict a lot of cash that their foreign competitors don't need to worry about.
Even when foreign companies have the same exact location and pension obligation, the operating results are quite different. We saw a clear example of this when 1 year after GM sold Opel to PSA, it made a huge profit. A lot of people use that as an example on how GM "mismanaged" Opel. It was none of that. The only difference is PSA didn't need to accrue pension expenses and is not required to set aside cash to pay for those pension.
Another example... for a few year FCA and subsequently Stellantis reported huge earnings from US operations. People reflectively point to Jeep and Dodge as cash cows. But really, the reason they were profitable is because the former Chrysler part of the company no longer reported results on US GAAP - the pension expenses disappeared overnight making Jeep appear very profitable. But the reality is all the products were aging and they needed replacements so the profits were really a short term benefits of accounting rule change going from US GAAP to IFRS.
It's not mismanaged per se. It's just very difficult to turn an accounting profit as an US company operating in Europe because of the accounting rules on pension costs is different for US companies vs. the rest of the world. Pension (both Govt mandated or private) and other defined benefits plans are still very common in Europe where there is no 401K like savings plan.
I'm a bit skeptical that Ford will commit to building CE1 in Europe. There is spare capacity to build it in North America - Mexico and Canada has free trade agreement with EU which is why Ford was going to build GE2 there instead of US. And Ford hasn't said a peep about what it is doing in India... they are restarting production there but only for export - the obvious destination is EU.
It was a strange decision to not use Tremor from the start since Explorer had always used truck trim levels since inception.
e.g. XL, XLS, Sport, XLT, Eddie Bauer, King Ranch, Platinum etc. all were/are Ford truck trim levels