By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Ford Motor stock (NYSE:F) traded 3% higher in Tuesday’s premarket on the company’s ambitious multi-billion dollar plans to be a serious player in the electric vehicle market.
The company will set up four factories -- three to manufacture batteries and one to make F-series pickups. Ford will invest $7 billion in the projects while South Korea’s SK Innovation (KS:096770) has committed $4.4 billion.
Ford will set up the battery factories with SK under a joint venture. Two battery factories in Kentucky and a third in western Tennessee alongside a new truck factory will come online by 2025, according to a joint press release.
The truck factory is Ford’s first completely new U.S. assembly plant in decades and its $7-billion investment is the largest ever in manufacturing at one time by any automotive manufacturer in the U.S. It forms part of a plan to invest more than $30 billion in electric vehicles through 2025, the press release said.
The company expects 40% to 50% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030.
Ford’s thrust on EV comes amid a worsening climate change. More and more investors and consumers are now turning away from products considered harmful for the environment and asking companies to provide a roadmap for a greener and a sustainable portfolio of products. It’s this movement that has made Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) market cap bigger than all legacy automakers’ market cap combined.