Sarah Webster – The Detroit Free Press

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Eisenstein representing The Detroit Bureau. Please proceed.

Paul Eisenstein – The Detroit Bureau

Thank you. Good morning gentlemen.

Alan Mulally

Good morning.

Paul Eisenstein – The Detroit Bureau

I just want to be very clear and I am sorry about repeating something, with Volvo and Mazda, since you get some of the clips, there has been a lot of coverage and a lot of speculation about those. While you are cautious about the issue of declaring them core assets, by the way this is the first part of the question I just want to make sure that at this point we have no reason to believe that there are any intentions of either selling off your stake in Mazda or selling Volvo. That’s the first question, I am telling this gentlemen in case we get cut off. The second part is, as you look at the deteriorating economy, realistically, do you see it necessary for Ford to receive significant loans, or at least some loans, from the government to maintain a healthy and viable position? Could you proceed as you are going now, or would you need the loans that are already, as you suggested, beginning to get loosened up and possibly a portion of the $25.0 billion additional money that Pelosi and others are now talking about?

Alan Mulally

Sure. Maybe I will address your latter question first. With respect to our fundamental plan going forward, the way I would think about it is that the way we see the world over the next couple of years is that we anticipate that 2009 will be no better than 2008, with a recovery happening in 2010 and based on that, with some robustness in our plans and conservatism that we are going to improve our cash position by that $14.0 billion to $17.0 billion to add to the position that we have, so that we can continue to invest in the new products and continue our restructuring. And we are not assuming the government loans in that plan. Now, the reason we are talking to the government and it’s not just the U.S. but around the world, is that clearly the world could deteriorate. The economies could deteriorate further and it could put the automobile industry at risk and so the most important thing we want to do is make sure we have this dialogue and we have mechanism in place that if it deteriorates substantially we would be able to access a bridge loan and pay it back and get through the downturn and keep this very important industry alive, because it is so important to the economy and the recovery. So that’s the good conversation we’re having with the government.

On the Mazda and the Volvo, our relationship with Mazda has not changed and whenever we have anything to announce we’ll announce it. On Volvo, I would just like to go back to the most important thing we’re doing on Volvo is focusing on improving their business performance. It’s a great brand. We’re really focusing on the product line, the premiumness of it, and also on the productivity and the costs and we’re making great progress. You saw the announcement we were making today and the reason I’m avoiding the non-core asset is that clearly we are focusing most of our attention on the Blue Oval around the world but Volvo is a great brand and we’re improving its performance, also. So that’s what we mean by that.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Bailey representing Reuters. Please proceed.

David Bailey – Reuters

Hi I just had a couple of quick questions here. In terms of the blue-collar buyouts, obviously you had 2,600 as you reported here. Do you expect to have any further buyouts on the hourly workers in North America at this point?

Alan Mulally

As I understand it the key to that question will be the market and the economy and the industry levels, and then our production rates going forward and we will continue implementing our plan of matching our production to the real demand and sizing ourselves accordingly. Because the most important thing we do is support the customer with the demand that they really want, not over-produce so we don’t have to discount the vehicles and ruin the residual values and that plan has worked very well for us and the customers going forward. So then we will size our production capability to the production. So that will go with the production changes we make in the future.

David Bailey – Reuters