Ford is preparing to put Volvo, the Swedish carmaker, on the sale block in a move that would leave the struggling American motor group with only its own-badge cars and Lincoln in the United States.

Volvo is part of Ford’s premier automotive group, a stable that includes Land Rover and Jaguar, which are both being sold. Their sale comes months after Ford disposed of Aston Martin as the American company struggled with record losses and plunging sales at home.

It had been thought that Volvo might be kept because it is profitable, but it is believed that Ford is now ready to receive offers. A Volvo sale would end Ford’s strategy of building up premium brands that began in the late 1980s.

According to a recent evaluation by Merril Lynch, Volvo could be worth $8 billion (£3.9 billion). It has been estimated that Land Rover and Jaguar, which are being sold together, could fetch about £1 billion. They are being sold as a pair because of the level of integration between them. Indicative bids are due in this Thursday.

Ford said that it was not in talks over the sale of Volvo, although all options for the business were being reviewed. It is understood that it is ready to dispose of Volvo and concentrate on recovery of its core Ford-badged business.

Analysts will be looking for any signs of recovery in Ford’s interim figures next week, the first results in which Alan Mulally, the chief executive, will have had a real chance to make a difference to the business’s fortunes. Mr Mulally was brought in by Bill Ford, the carmaker’s chairman, from Boeing last autumn after successive recovery attempts to arrest Ford’s decline had failed. Last year the company racked up record losses of $12.7 billion.

Volvo is a bigger business than Land Rover and Jaguar together. The British units employ about 16,000 while the Swedish company has 27,000 workers in Sweden and Belgium. It has some integration with the Ford business, but it is not as interconnected with its parent as Land Rover and Jaguar are with each other. The two British marques are entwined because they share production and research and development facilities.

Private equity groups are expected to be interested in Volvo, as they are in the sales of the British brands.

Unite, the UK’s biggest union, has urged the Government to intervene to prevent the takeover of Land Rover and Jaguar by private equity. It fears that buyout firms would not invest sufficiently in the companies and would fail to act for the long term, which, it says, is an essential strategy in the car industry, with its long product lead times.

Ford’s premier automotve group was largely the brainchild of Jacques Nasser, the former chief executive, who sought to diversify the car group from its traditional base. Mr Nasser was ousted by Mr Ford. He has sinced showed an interest in buying Jaguar but it is not certain whether One Equity, his private equity group, will table a formal bid. Mr Nasser held talks with Ford last August before the British brands were put up for sale.

Ford ended its own-badge carmaking in Britain six years ago when it closed the Dagenham assembly plant. However, it retained part of the Essex site to build engines, arguing that engine-making was better-suited to the UK than volume carmaking. With another factory at Bridgend, Glamorgan, Ford now makes one in four of all its car engines in Britain.

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