June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Ford Motor Co.'s Hertz rental-car unit plans an initial public offering of stock, as the automaker moves ahead with efforts announced in April to raise money through options including selling the business.

Hertz disclosed the plan in a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The unit said it would use proceeds to repay $1.19 billion in promissory notes issued to Ford on June 10. Hertz didn't say when the stock sale might occur, how many shares it plans to sell or at what price.

The filing ``gives us an option to do an IPO,'' Ford spokesman Glenn Ray said. The Dearborn, Michigan-based company is also examining the possibility of selling all of Hertz to a third party, and may spin off the unit to shareholders as part of an IPO, he said. Ford in a statement said that after an offering, it intends to divest its remaining interest in Hertz.

Ford, the second-largest U.S. automaker, said April 20 it was evaluating what to do with Hertz. Chief Executive William Clay Ford Jr., 48, said in a news conference that day that the company was ``moving away from daily rental.'' The automaker said then that it might sell the unit to raise money for its auto business as it tries to halt a drop in U.S. market share.

The automaker earlier in April slashed its 2005 forecast because of lower sales and higher material costs. Ford's U.S. sales of cars and light trucks fell 5.7 percent in this year's first five months, cutting its market share by 1 percentage point to 19.1 percent, according to Autodata Corp.

`Competitive Pressures'

``Ford wants to focus on the manufacturing business,'' Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group Inc. in Ann Arbor, said in an interview. ``The competitive pressures are such you need to refresh your product more often. You need to invest heavily on new products on a regular basis.''

The rental-car unit, based in Park Ridge, New Jersey, said in the filing that the initial offering would be as much as $100 million, a figure it said was only for the purpose of calculating the registration fee. Hertz said it planned to list the shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ``HRZ.''

Units of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would manage the offering, the automaker said in its statement. Standard & Poor's rates Hertz as BBB-, the lowest investment grade, better than the BB+ rating it assigned to Ford on May 5. Hertz has a ``fairly strong financial profile on a stand-alone basis,'' S&P said in a June 7 statement.

Hertz's net income in 2004 rose to $365.5 million from $158.6 million in 2003, as revenue increased to $6.68 billion in 2004 from $5.93 billion, according to the unit's filing.

Largest `General Use' Brand

The unit in its filing said it believes it's ``the largest worldwide general use car rental brand.'' Closely held Enterprise Rent-A-Car said in April that its 2004 revenue was $7.4 billion, making it larger on that basis than Hertz.

Hertz spokesman Richard Broome said in an April interview that the unit was largest in ``number of countries we're in, the number of locations, market penetration worldwide. We're in more than 150 countries, over 7,200 locations.''

Ford bought a stake in Hertz in 1987 from Allegis Corp., the predecessor of United Airlines parent UAL Corp., and became sole owner in 1994. In 1997, the automaker sold an 18.5 percent stake in the rental-car unit through a $480 million initial sale of stock to the public. Ford bought back the shares in 2001, after saying ``the market isn't valuing the company properly.''

The automaker has sold off units for about $1.6 billion since January 2002, and put the money into auto operations, Chief Financial Officer Don Leclair told reporters on April 20.

Ford also is preparing to sell another small ``non-core'' business this year, he said then, without giving details.

The company's unit sales in the past three years include the U.K.-based Kwik-Fit auto-repair chain in 2002. Kwik-Fit was part of former Chief Executive Jacques Nasser's plan to diversify beyond automaking and sold for 330 million pounds, or about $505 million at the time the sale was announced. That was about a third of what Ford had paid for the business. Bill Ford deposed Nasser as chief executive in October 2001.

Ford shares rose 19 cents to $10.52 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have fallen 28 percent this year.

To contact the reporter of this story: Bill Koenig in Southfield, Michigan, at wkoenig@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 13, 2005 18:13 EDT