Ford Shares Look to Hold Ground After F-150 Aluminum Supplier Comes Back Online

• Ford was off 3.2% late Wednesday morning. The stock earlier hit a session high of $15.24.• Novelis reported its Oswego, New York, hot mill is running again, which matters for Ford’s F-Series pickup, since it uses a lot of aluminum.• Investors are now watching how fast the restart scales.

Repairs at Novelis’s Oswego, New York, aluminum plant—damaged by fire—should wrap up by the end of June, the Wall Street Journal said Wednesday. That timeline could help relieve a key supply snag for Ford Motor and other carmakers.

Ford’s shares were hammered in early October after a “devastating” late-night fire at a crucial supplier raised alarms about production delays. The fire broke out on Sept. 16 at Novelis’s Oswego, New York plant – a facility that produces roughly 40% of the aluminum sheet used by the U.S. auto industrymarkets.chroniclejournal.com. Novelis, a subsidiary of Hindalco, is Ford’s primary source of aluminum for its vehicles. Critically, Ford’s flagship F-Series pickup trucks rely heavily on aluminum bodies, a design choice made to save weight but now a glaring vulnerability. The blaze “caused catastrophic damage to the factory’s hot mill”, which was essentially destroyed and will not be operational again until Q1 2026markets.chroniclejournal.commarkets.chroniclejournal.com. Thankfully no one was hurt, but the incident has effectively choked off a key supply of aluminum to Ford for the next several months.