10-K Ford Motor Company

Abstract

The Securities Exchange Commission, or SEC requires companies to provide something called a Form 10-k. This form 10-k is similar to an annual report, and is provided by the company to serve as a comprehensive summary of the company’s financial performance. Ford Motor Company falls under the criteria of a company that has more than $10 million in assets a class of equity securities of 500 or more, so they have filed a 10-k report to the SEC.

What is a Form 10-k?

Ford Motor Company’s 10-k report was very comprehensive and contained everything about the company that investors and other shareholders in the company. The purpose of the Form 10-K is to provide comprehensive details of the company's business and financial condition (Epstein, 2014). As Jury (2012) stated, humans have been engaging in trade for thousands of years, initially through some sort of barter process”, so the need to have knowledge on what is being bought and sold is at an all time high for investors. The importance of a 10-k is not only in the hands of the shareholders and executives, but also the document is vital to buyers and sellers of the company’s stock. By law, the government forces companies like Ford Motor Company to provide detailed information on all finances, opportunities, risk factors, and what direction the company’s financial forecast is headed in. At first glance, a 10-k report looks similar to an annual report, but a 10-k report provides more detailed information in specific format that is different from an annual report.

Ford Motor Company

In Ford Motor Company’s Form 10-k, the report is broken down into four different sections, each of which provide a detailed summary of the company’s well being in that particular area. Part 1 consists of issues that concern the business, legal proceedings, marketing, properties and mine safety disclosures. One thing that was interesting about the Form 10-k was how Ford was able to show that the increasing of financing by...