It was a great place where people knew all their neighbours and nobody locked their front door. IBJ: Andy, a lot of people know you just from what happened at Enron, so can you please tell us a bit about your upbringing and how you ended up at Enron?ĪF: Sure, I was born in New Jersey, growing up in a town with a population of just a few thousand people. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, the world’s most infamous finance executive talks to Ivey Business School Professor Gerard Seijts about how a good kid from a good home, who received a good education from good schools, ended up a willing participant in one of the largest corporate frauds in U.S. investigation into Enron’s collapse, Fastow accepts full accountability for the immeasurable damage caused by what he calls flaws in his character that enabled him to justify clearly questionable interpretations of accounting laws. Today, after serving a reduced sentence for cooperating with the U.S. That changed in 2002, when he was indicted on multiple counts of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. Simply put, Fastow felt like a creative corporate hero, not a criminal. “We’ve increased shareholder value, grown the balance sheet, maintained a stable outlook from the rating agencies, and achieved a low cost of capital,” he told CFO Magazine. Referring to the firm’s use of unique financing techniques as groundbreaking, a Lehman Brothers executive noted: “Thanks to Andy Fastow, Enron has been able to develop all these different businesses, which require huge amounts of capital, without diluting the stock price or deteriorating its credit quality - both of which actually have gone up.” At the time, Fastow was extremely proud to have helped Enron increase its market capitalization from about US$3.5 billion in 1990 to around US$35 billion in 1999 without issuing a whole lot of equity. Back then, people inside and outside of the Houston-based company, including stock analysts and credit-rating experts, were falling over themselves to say good things about Enron’s spectacular transformation from domestic pipeline business to fully integrated global energy company. But if it can get out ahead of some other market offerings yet to come-as the Lightning did-Ford might be able to create another hit.In 1999, a 37-year-old Andrew Fastow received a CFO Magazine award for capital structure work at Enron. It would need to rival the Kia EV9 and, upmarket, the Rivian R1S, Tesla Model X, and Volvo EX90, among others. Such an electric SUV wouldn’t be the first with three rows. One such example of this would be the “SUV coupe” body styles that some automakers have introduced to the EV market. “We want to have a lot of scale per top hat,” said Farley in this week’s call, again suggesting that the company is aiming to avoid niche models. In Ford’s last quarterly call, Farley revealed that future Ford EVs will be “radically simplified,” with fewer body styles and “just a handful of orderable combinations.” He also emphasized that this will mean better quality and lower manufacturing costs. “We’re seeing that the second EV purchase is much more loyal to the brand in these developed EV markets.”įarley emphasized that such future models will amount to tremendous growth, but that growth needs to be managed. “We also found that customers are very loyal to full EV powertrains once they enter, but they are not brand-loyal for their first purchase,” added Farley, noting that over 60% of its customers are new to Ford. family mainstay-not to be confused with the VW-based Ford Explorer EV for Europe revealed in March-may keep some existing owners who already have a Mach-E from moving on to another brand for something larger and electric.įord Explorer electric crossover for Europe “And we intend to do that with a three-row crossover and with a bunch of EV Pro vehicles, which we think will be a huge growth for us.”įord might be eyeing the form factor of the Ford Explorer, or former Ford Flex, perhaps. “A lot of new customers bought a Lightning that never owned a pickup truck before,” said Farley. And as Ford CEO Jim Farley underscored this week in a quarterly financial call, there’s room to do that again in the near future with other vehicle types-like with a three-row electric SUV. Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric pickup has managed to capture a high rate of customers who hadn’t considered an electric vehicle before, with EV newbies making up nearly 80% of reservation-holders.
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