TOKYO – Toyota’s quarterly profit fell more than 75 percent after the March earthquake and tsunami wiped out parts suppliers in northeastern Japan, severely disrupting car production.
Toyota Motor Corp. reported Wednesday that January-March profit slid to 25.4 billion yen ($314 million) from 112.2 billion yen a year earlier.
Additional Photos
The maker of the popular Prius hybrid gave no forecast for the current fiscal year through March 2012, citing an uncertain outlook because production continues to be hampered by shortages of parts. Toyota is expected to lose its spot as the world’s top-selling automaker to General Motors Co. this year because of the disasters.
The automaker’s president, Akio Toyoda, said he and others at Toyota are “gritting our teeth” to keep jobs in Japan. He promised to disclose earnings forecasts by mid-June.
For the fiscal year ended March 2011, Toyota’s earnings doubled, showing that the Japanese automaker had been on the way to recovery from its recall crisis when the magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck March 11.
Toyota said it sold 7.31 million vehicles, up 71,000 vehicles from the previous year. Profit doubled to 408.1 billion yen ($5 billion) from 209.4 billion yen.
For the January-March period, Toyota sold 1.79 million vehicles worldwide. That is fewer than the 2.22 million vehicles sold by GM and the 1.99 million sold by the No. 3 automaker, Volkswagen AG of Germany.
But Toyota also said efforts to fix production, including using other plants and finding replacement parts, were going better than initially expected, with car manufacturing expected to gradually pick up in Japan and abroad from next month to 70 percent of pre-disaster levels.
By the end of May, the crisis has cost the company production of 550,000 vehicles in Japan and another 350,000 overseas. Production is now back at about 50 percent.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.