The pace of supplier mergers and acquisitions could soon pick up as companies look to reposition themselves for the EV era and as private equity firms seek to put hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding capital to work.
Two dealership groups entered new states, a dealer and his group expanded in Chicago and an entrepreneur purchased his first franchised dealership — all in transactions that closed in the fourth quarter.
LANSING — Michigan notched a win with Ford Motor Co.’s decision to build a $3.5 billion, 2,500-job electric vehicle battery factory in Marshall.
But the deal, more pieces of which lawmakers could finalize as soon as Wednesday, will not come cheap.
The state will provide significantly more money for the project than for other major business expansions announced since the creation of a new fund to lure companies 15 months ago.
The cost is expected to total $1.7 billion, or about $693,000 a job, or $1 billion and $384,000 per job if only cash, but not a special tax break, is factored in.
The spending will be far more than what is being disbursed for other top projects benefiting from the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund or, in some cases, a direct appropriation enacted into law by the Legislature and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The account was formed in late 2021 after Dearborn-based Ford chose to locate EV assembly and battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.
“I believe that we paid a premium for Ford to tell a good story, which is: ‘We created this fund because we lost Ford, and now we’ve attracted Ford.’ But the issue is at what cost? That’s $1.7 billion of benefits they received, totaling $725,000 a job, which is way out of whack with what we paid” for other agreements, said House Minority Leader Matt Hall, a Republican from Kalamazoo County’s Richland Township and a critic of the deal.
Mexico has lofty ambitions to boost EV ownership as Tesla gears up to develop its factory in the northern border state of Nuevo Leon.
Italian luxury sports car maker Ferrari was hit with a ransomware attack that exposed customers’ personal information.
It’s not clear when Ferrari’s Italian subsidiary was contacted by a hacker or group with a ransom demand related to the exposure of customer information nor did Ferrari disclose the ransom amount.
Ferrari said it is investigating the breach with an unnamed “leading global third-party cybersecurity firm” and has informed law enforcement authorities.
Ferrari’s policy is not to pay ransom demands to hackers because the company thinks it will perpetuate cyberattacks.
While many companies will pay white hat hackers to find vulnerabilities, the auto industry pays among the least for discovering potential breaches, according to research by San Francisco’s HackerOne. It operates bug bounty programs for BMW, Ford, Rivian and Toyota.
“Instead, we believed the best course of action was to inform our clients and thus we have notified our customers of the potential data exposure and the nature of the incident,” Ferrari said in a statement. “We can also confirm the breach has had no impact on the operational functions of our company.”