Aggressive sales offers reduce Toyota’s loss
August 6, 2009
Booming sales of the Prius hybrid helped Toyota, the world’s No. 1 automaker, deliver a smaller-than-expected 77.82-billion yen ($819-million) quarterly loss and narrow its forecast of red ink for the full year.
The Japanese carmaker, whose models include the Corolla subcompact and luxury Lexus, said Tuesday that it expected a 450-billion yen ($4.7 billion) loss for the fiscal year through March 2010, better than the 550-billion-yen loss initially projected.
The results for the April-June quarter showed that Toyota Motor Corp. is getting some traction from aggressive cost-cutting and Japanese government incentives that have boosted sales of green cars like the Prius. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had forecast a fiscal first-quarter loss of 210 billion yen.
Toyota, which dethroned General Motors Corp. as the world’s top-selling automaker in 2008, raised its global vehicle sales forecast for the fiscal year by 100,000, to 6.6 million vehicles. The increase reflected the success of the Prius in Japan while sales forecasts for Europe and North America were unchanged.
Toyota sold 1.4 million vehicles worldwide during the quarter, a decrease of 785,000 from a year earlier. Quarterly sales dropped 38.3% to 3.836 trillion yen ($40.4 billion) as vehicle sales slipped in almost all regions, including North America, Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia.
In Japan, quarterly sales totalled 407,000 vehicles, down 105,000 from the previous year, while Toyota said it sold 387,000 vehicles in North America, down 342,000.
For more details, please visit http://www.latimes.com/
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