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Andrew Thorns
• Fresh from four years as Ford Motor Co's dealer planning manager, Andy Thorns starts with an unparalleled advantage in his new job as director of truck sales, which he took over in April. As he told me last week: "There's hardly a Ford distributor or dealer whom I don't know, and most of them I know personally".
His appointment has also coincided with the industry's climb out of the long, long trough of domestic recession and Ford's estimates for 1973 are based on a total UK truck market of around 72,000. Andy Thorns sees Ford as "at least holding" its present 22.7 per cent of the market and is in fact looking for 24 per cent next year.
Mr Thorns is a quiet, practical Scotsman (his own description) but he is far from reticent about the products for which he is now responsible. Confirming Ford's plans for selling trucks in Europe, he added: "We are leading in the UK, and are now gearing ourselves to do the same'abroad".
He sees his new job as ,consolidating the company's position "as class leaders with both the Transit and the D series". Transit sales were, he told me, 38.5 per cent of the whole medium cv market in June — "a fantastic story of success maintained over seven years".
One of the trends he identified as a particular growth area was the swing to demountable bodies, which he sees as encouraging the development of air suspension.
The son of a Fife farmer, Andy Thorns was set on getting into big business, and had his opportunity even sooner than he could have hoped: a Ford personnel executive came hunting for management trainees at Edinburgh University just as Andy was about to sit for his Economics degree — and he has been a Ford man since graduation.
He owes his grounding in management to the company's graduate trainee course, which puts young men through every aspect of the business in about two years, but immediately afterwards he had the advantage of deepening his knowledge as a manager when he successfully applied for a business management vacancy on the sales side. Since then he has never looked back, and at 46 bears the stamp of the true professional manager. B.C.