gavriil

Kyodo News - June 18, 2003

NAGOYA, Jun 18, 2003 (Kyodo via COMTEX) -- Toyota Motor Corp. became the world's third largest carmaker in 2002 in terms of the number of vehicles sold globally, surpassing Germany's DaimlerChrysler AG which ranked fourth, a Japanese research firm said Wednesday.

The Toyota group, which includes Daihatsu Motor Co. and Hino Motors Ltd., sold 6.09 million vehicles in 2002, up 200,000 units from 2001, thanks mainly to robust sales in North America, Fourin Inc. said in a survey.

DaimlerChrysler sold 5.81 million vehicles, down 80,000 units, as its Chrysler unit in North America continued to perform poorly, it said.

Ranked first was U.S. auto giant General Motors Corp. (GM), followed by Ford Motor Co., according to Fourin, a Nagoya-based research and publishing firm that specializes in the global automotive industry.

GM and Ford retained the same rankings as the previous year, but their global sales declined due mainly to sluggish European sales, Fourin said.

French carmaker Renault SA, which has a stake in Nissan Motor Co., moved up to fifth place from sixth as sales by Nissan grew.

Honda Motor Co. retained eighth place.

TypeS-Cgy

3rd largest auto manufacturer of CRAP!

1SICKLEX

Get your head out of the toilet bowl.


Resistance is FUTILE!!!

thatguy

.

Crazy Bimmer

how you figure?

Bobbydoedoe

Ur crap

heyitsme

toyota isn't that exciting of a company even though they have the resources to be one.

kansaiwalker1

Friday, January 23, 2004


Toyota climbs to No. 2

Japanese automaker likely will overtake Ford as second largest in worldwide sales

By Christine Tierney / The Detroit News

After snapping at Ford Motor Co.’s heels, Japanese giant Toyota Motor Co.p. may finally overtake its Dearborn rival to become the world’s No. 2 automaker when it announces global sales next week.

Ford reported Thursday that its sales slipped last year by 253,000 units to 6.72 million, slightly below Toyota’s recent forecast for 6.78 million in vehicle sales for 2003.

The global ranking may be largely symbolic, but Ford’s drop to third place after 75 years as No. 2 underscores the challenges the automaker faces in its recovery efforts and the risks of more plant closings.

“For the past 25 years, Toyota has been expanding all over the world. Ford has really focused mostly on North America and Europe,” said Michael Robinet of CSM Worldwide, a forecasting firm in Northville. “I see Toyota passing Ford and sustaining the lead for a very, very long time.”

Last month, Toyota estimated its final 2003 figures would show an increase in global sales of 10 percent, bolstered by record sales of its Lexus and Toyota brands in North America.

Toyota’s U.S. vehicle sales rose 6.3 percent last year, to 1.87 million units, while Ford reported a 3.9 percent drop in U.S. sales, roughly in line with the overall market’s decline.

Rebecca Lindland, a forecaster at Lexington, Mass.-based Global Insight, estimates Toyota’s 2003 sales totalled 6.8 million vehicles, exceeding Ford’s, according to Bloomberg News.

Ford dismissed the speculation that it could slip to third place. “Ford doesn’t have objectives to be No. 1, or No. 2 or No. 9,” said George Pipas, Ford manager for U.S. sales analysis.

“Our objectives are building great products and improving the profitability of our business,” he said.

Toyota had no comment.

Jim Hall, an analyst at forecasting firm AutoPacific Group, said he did not believe Toyota overtook Ford in 2003, because it could not produce sufficient volumes in Japan of popular models like the Toyota Highlander SUV.

“They’re shy (of Ford’s sales) in 2003, but they could conceivably do it in 2004,” Hall said.

Sales volumes are only one measure of an automaker’s performance, but Toyota is also far more profitable than Ford — or any Detroit automaker — and it increased sales in all of its major markets last year without relying heavily on incentives.


Ford's vehicle sales for 2003: 6.72M

Toyota's forecast 2003 sales: 6.78M

shaHn78

No more maybes... Toyota has already topped Ford for #2

riceburner503

So whos #1?

goldmember

GM is my googled guess.

Black CL-S 4-Life

GM

kansaiwalker1

Sounds like that 60's show "the Prisoner"

Who is Number 1? YOU are Number 6!

goldmember

way before my time, brother.

gavriil

Toyota says Ford is still world's No. 2 automaker - By MARK RECHTIN | Automotive News

SAN FRANCISCO -- Toyota Motor Corp. did not pass Ford Motor Co. in global unit sales in 2003, Toyota President Fujio Cho said.

Sales numbers released by Toyota in January appeared to show that it supplanted Ford as the world's No. 2 automaker. But Ford comes out on top when sales of the two companies are counted on the same basis.

"If you use exactly the same basis for comparison, Ford is the No. 2 carmaker," Cho said at a press briefing.

The difference came down to whether wholesale or retail vehicle sales are counted. Toyota wholesaled 6.49 million vehicles in 2003, Cho said. Ford wholesaled 6.72 million vehicles in 2003.

Source: Autoweek

gavriil

Toyota earns $10 billion - with a "b" - - Jim Burt - - Source: The Car Connection

That's $10 billion with a "b."

Toyota Motor on Tuesday became the first Japanese company to report a net profit of over a trillion yen, or about $10 billion U.S. greenbacks. Toyota's global sales are slightly ahead of Ford Motor Co., but considering Ford earned just $675 million last year, Toyota's number-two spot behind General Motors is solid and gaining.

Toyota executives have said they plan to match GM's 15-percent market share held today by 2015. Toyota's share now stands at about 11.2 percent.

Amazingly, Toyota's market capitalization stands at more than that of GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler combined.

Japan's largest automaker posted $10.2 billion in net earnings for the year ended March 31, a 55-percent gain from the previous year, on revenues of $152 billion, helped by rising sales and profits in every region of the world, cost cutting, and a one-time pension fund gain.

Toyota sold 6.7 million vehicles last year, and said it is out to sell 7.02 million vehicles worldwide this fiscal year. GM sold 8.3 million vehicles last year.

Toyota passed Ford Motor in global vehicle sales last year, though Ford's tally of 6.7 million vehicles did not include any sales from Japanese automaker Mazda Motor Corp., 33-percent-owned by Ford. Ford earned $495 million last year.

Toyota's sales to markets including Asia, Middle East rose by 277,000 last year, far stronger than rises of 122,000 units to North America, 120,000 in Europe, and 85,000 in Japan.

"Toyota is on a roll, boosting sales in America, Europe, and Asia," said Takaki Nakanishi, analyst at UBS Securities in Tokyo.

Toyota sold 1.86 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles in the U.S. last calender year, up 6.3 percent. Toyota is amidst a national rollout of a third brand aimed at the youth market, called Scion, currently made up of two vehicles with a third on the way later this year, that has sold 17,000 so far this year. "Every global car we've rolled out has been a hit - I've never experienced anything like this before," said Toyota executive vice president Ryuji Araki.

U.S. automakers beef that Toyota's profit is helped by a weak yen. Though Toyota said it lost $900 million last year on the yen's strengthening against the U.S. dollar and Euro, the Bank of Japan spent $190 billion intervening in currency markets at the direction of the Japanese Finance Ministry. The result was the dollar weakening against the yen by only 11 percent while it weakened against the euro by 20 percent.

Japan's healthcare system is also much cheaper for Japanese companies than in the U.S. The Japanese government has been taking pension obligations off companies' books.

Toyota said it gained $943 million last year from reimbursement from a government pension fund.

Toyota said sales outside Japan may rise 6.2 percent this year to 4.69 million units. Sales in North America, the world's biggest automotive market, may increase 3.7 percent to 2.18 million units for the period. So far this year in the U.S., Toyota-brand vehicles are up 11 percent and Lexus sales are up 21 percent.

DISRUPTV

ohhh man


seems like toyota cant do any wrong


i'd def invest in some toyota stocks 4 the long term....i cant see anything stopping them

DISRUPTV

btw, hows honda doing?

nandowong

toyota's net profit per vehicle averages about $1,500. not bad

Python2121

i just hope they dont slacken off with their success

Infamous425

i dont think they will, theyre not honda :o

SpeedyV6

Bumpy Road
As Toyota Closes In on GM,
Quality Concerns Also Grow

Amid Record Profits,
It Strives To Stanch Flow of Errors;
Dearth of Production Gurus
Tutoring Americans in Kaizen
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU and SEBASTIAN MOFFETT
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 4, 2004; Page A1

TOYOTA CITY, Japan -- Toyota Motor Corp., one of the most successful companies in the world, is scrambling to overhaul itself.

After nearly doubling its revenue in the past decade and redefining competition in key parts of the auto business, Toyota suddenly finds itself confronting mushrooming quality problems. Torrid growth has spread thin the company's famed Japanese quality gurus. This means that, in places like Toyota's Georgetown, Ky., plant, the pressure is on to retrain American workers to take up more of the slack. At the same time, Toyota has launched a world-wide campaign to simplify its production systems.

By many measures, Toyota is still barreling along. The company's net income of $10.49 billion in yen in the year ended March 31 not only exceeded those of rivals General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. combined, but set a record for any Japanese company. Toyota continued the trend yesterday, reporting a 29% rise in net income for the quarter ended June 30, to $2.59 billion, up from $2.01 billion in the year-earlier period. Group sales rose 10% to $40.78 billion.

Toyota's next big goal is to expand its share of the global market to 15% over the next decade, from 10% now. That would make Toyota roughly the same size No. 1 auto maker GM is today.


But there are signs that the company's ambitious growth agenda is straining human and technical resources and undercutting quality, one of Toyota's most critical strategic advantages. It is the kind of paradox many highly successful companies face: Getting bigger doesn't always mean getting better.

Toyota still tends to outscore most rivals, including Detroit's Big Three auto makers and European brands, on industry surveys of quality and reliability. But Toyota's lead has narrowed and in certain key segments disappeared. "Toyota quality isn't improving as fast as it should," Toyota's president, Fujio Cho, concedes in an interview.

To stop the quality slide, Mr. Cho says Toyota has launched multiple "special task forces" at trouble spots in places such as North America and China to overhaul shop-floor management. Toyota also has established a Global Production Center in Toyota City to train midlevel factory managers so they can more effectively run plants outside Japan. Toyota now is re-evaluating some of its most fundamental operating strategies.

"We are getting back to basics," says Gary Convis, a Toyota managing officer, who is also president of the Georgetown plant.

An important part of that effort focuses not on machines or high-speed information technology, but on replicating a special class of people who were instrumental in making Toyota a manufacturing powerhouse during the past 25 years.

When Toyota first began opening factories in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, kicking off its dramatic global expansion, some of the most important people in the new plants weren't top executives, but midlevel Japanese managers commonly known as coordinators.

These coordinators were experts in Toyota's lean-manufacturing techniques and philosophies, commonly known as the Toyota Production System, or TPS. These coordinators, usually with 20 or more years of experience, generally shunned classrooms. Instead they trained American shop-floor managers and hourly associates by attacking issues directly on the assembly line.

A central concept was that there is an endless possibility for kaizen, or continuous improvement, in every process. The Toyota coordinators tried to make each worker a "thinking machine," capable of constant learning.


The principles behind lean production took shape over five decades, starting with efforts in the 1930s by one of the company's founding fathers, Kiichiro Toyoda. The Toyota system took its current form during the 1950s with the leadership of Taiichi Ohno, a legendary Toyota engineer who drew inspiration from a trip to the U.S. during which he watched how a supermarket stocked its shelves using a just-in-time delivery of goods.

Mr. Ohno preached there are seven forms of muda, or waste, in any process. When Mr. Ohno trained recruits to Toyota's elite Operations Management Consulting Division, he drew a chalk circle on the floor in front of a process on the assembly line and told the trainee to watch that job until he could identify how it could be improved. A trainee could stand for nearly a day before he was able to satisfy Mr. Ohno with his answer.

When Mr. Ohno began applying his production approach full-scale, Toyota factories achieved huge gains in productivity and efficiency. The marriage of efficient production to an obsessive concern for quality helped Toyota establish a reputation for bullet-proof reliability that remains a huge competitive advantage.

By the late 1980s, lean production was a deeply entrenched way of life at Toyota, governing just about every aspect of its corporate activities.

Hajime Oba, a retired TPS guru who still works for the company in North America on a project-by-project basis, likens the system to a form of religion. Managers at Detroit's Big Three auto makers, he says, use lean techniques simply as a way to slash inventory. "What [they] are doing is creating a Buddha image and forgetting to inject soul in it," Mr. Oba says.

But as years went by, Toyota discovered that its corporate faith was getting watered down as the company spread its operations world-wide and hired generations of employees ever more distant from Mr. Ohno.

A case in point is Toyota's massive factory in Georgetown, Ky., the first plant the auto maker built in the U.S. from the ground up.

Georgetown began production in 1986, and throughout the 1990s the plant routinely claimed the top spots in J.D. Power & Associates' widely watched initial quality survey for cars sold in the U.S.

But after being named North America's second-best plant in 2001 behind Toyota's Canadian plant in Cambridge, Ontario, Georgetown has slumped. This year, it ranked No. 14, after placing No. 15 in 2003 and No. 26 in 2002. Two GM plants in Michigan, the Lansing Grand River Cadillac factory and a large car plant in Hamtramck, and Ford's luxury-car factory in Wixom, Mich., were North America's top three plants this year.

One big problem that Georgetown faced all along has been language. Most of the Toyota-production-system masters speak fluently only in Japanese. Most of their American employees speak only English. The linguistic and cultural barriers make deep discussions on lean production almost impossible and can cause other problems. One executive coordinator on his second tour in the U.S. as a TPS evangelist says he left his wife and sons back in Japan because his boys were "becoming too Americanized."

Another issue is time -- or the lack of it. As sales of Toyota vehicles in the North American market took off, Toyota factories had to ramp up quickly to keep up with demand. That meant a plant like Georgetown had to rapidly promote American shop-floor managers and hourly associates, instead of nurturing them gradually in the Toyota manufacturing way and deepening their skills and knowledge.

"Demand for ... high volumes saps your energy," says Mr. Convis. "Over a period of time, it eroded our focus." High turnover among workers and managers on the shop floor also "thinned out the expertise and knowledge we painstakingly built up over the years."

But by far the biggest headache at Georgetown now stems from a scarcity of TPS coordinators from Japan.

As the auto maker stepped up the pace of factory openings globally, those expansion plans meant fewer coordinators for older, more established plants like Georgetown.


At Georgetown, one glaring symptom of trouble, its top executives say, is that some hourly assemblers began ignoring standardized work processes -- considered one of the biggest sins inside Toyota plants because of the impact on the consistency and accuracy of manufacturing.

Georgetown also lost some lean-production masters to age and competitors. Kazumi Nakada, a TPS master, worked in tandem with Mr. Cho, the then-Georgetown president, to launch Georgetown in the mid-1980s. But Mr. Nakada left Toyota in 1995 to join GM, which was intensifying its efforts to catch up with Toyota in vehicle quality by copying its manufacturing methods. Mr. Nakada worked at GM overhauling its manufacturing system in Europe and now works for the big auto-parts maker, Delphi Corp., a former GM unit whose leaders are vigorous Toyota Production System converts.

By the time Mr. Convis arrived at Georgetown in mid-2000 from the GM-Toyota plant in California, Georgetown was showing signs of trouble. Yet the plant's management was in charge of leading Toyota's effort to set up a pickup-truck plant in Tijuana, Mexico. Mr. Convis asked his superiors in Japan for help, in the form of TPS masters who could work on the Mexico project. The reply was a "flat no," Mr. Convis says.

That was "a real wakeup call," Mr. Convis says.

To shore up Georgetown's mastery of lean production to a level where it could function without relying so much on Japanese TPS coordinators, the plant's top management circle launched an emergency 18-month project in 2000 in order to gradually build back up the core of its front-line managers. The effort has since continued as a more formalized Organization Development Group.

Mr. Convis recruited Mr. Oba, the TPS guru, to help implement the Georgetown project. Among other issues, Mr. Oba found many shop-floor leaders would spend too much time in their offices, instead of prowling the factory floor coaching and leading kaizen projects with assembly workers.

To shake things up, Mr. Convis and Mr. Oba dragged about 70 midlevel managers through projects at various Toyota parts suppliers for "real life" kaizen. The goal was in part to "embarrass the hell out of them" in front of suppliers whom they had been used to bossing around, says Mr. Oba, to highlight the need for them to learn more about TPS.

Still, in 2002, Georgetown suffered one of the biggest blows to its track record for quality. The plant began pumping out the new Camry sedan in the fall of 2001, and soon buyers began griping about the car's spongy brakes and cup holders that interfered with the shift lever when a tall travel mug was placed in them. Long skinny plastic strips, called "Mohican molding," that covered up weld marks on the car's roof also sometimes peeled off, in part because of lack of testing.

Those problems helped to send the number of customer complaints about the quality of the new Camry soaring in the annual initial quality survey by J.D. Power. In 2002, the car had 117 problems per 100 vehicles and was the sixth-best vehicle in the survey's "premium midsize car" category. Just two years earlier, in 2000, the Camry was America's best vehicle in that segment.

Since then, the Camry's initial quality ranking has declined to No. 7 in 2003 and No. 8 in 2004 despite the fact that the number of customer complaints declined, placing the car well behind rivals such as the Buick Century and the Chevy Monte Carlo.

Now, with some rivals closing the gap in efficiency and quality, Toyota is scrambling to take lean production to a new level -- one that is simple enough to function without the constant help of Japanese coordinators with 20 years of experience or more in lean production.

The company, among other efforts, is trying to augment its traditional hands-on approach to teaching TPS principles with more systematic and easier-to-understand tools, such as TPS manuals.

In Toyota City, Toyota's Global Production Center aims to train shop-floor leaders for Toyota factories outside Japan. Inside the center is a mock assembly line where trainees can learn TPS principles by, among other methods, watching videos of an "ideal" standardized way to handle an assembly process.

Another related effort is the Organization Development Group Mr. Convis helped set up at Georgetown, which aims to more slowly and extensively nurture American shop-floor managers in TPS and create future leaders of the plant who won't have to rely on Japanese TPS gurus to run day-to-day operations. A similar effort is also going on at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., the plant in Fremont, California, Toyota owns jointly with GM.

But the most critical part of the effort is on display in a new assembly system at Toyota's Tsutsumi plant in Toyota City -- a new standard-bearer of the Toyota production way that is now being spread to North America and China, among other places.

A typical assembly line is lined with makeshift shelves. At most Toyota plants, those racks hold just 80 minutes worth of components. With several different models coming down the same line (Tsutsumi makes six to seven different models in both of its assembly lines), workers have to be sure to pick the right parts from the shelves. That can mean sorting through more than two dozen versions of the same basic components in some cases.

Tsutsumi eliminated almost all the parts shelves that used to flank the plant's snaking assembly line and designed a system where logistics workers synchronize packages of parts according to the order of vehicles heading down the assembly line and deliver them in foot-long or smaller containers placed inside a welded vehicle body. Assembly workers simply pick up parts from those containers according to the way they are laid out, without having to choose the right component from a parts shelf.

Error proofing, or what Toyota calls "poke yoke," (po-kay yo-kay) is increasingly important for the auto maker, because as the company's plants began sprouting around the world, it has learned it can't count on having a work force that is as steeped in Toyota's traditions, or as loyal and motivated, as Toyota City factory workers, whose quality and efficiency amazed rivals in the early 1980s.

At the Fremont, Calif., plant Toyota jointly operates and owns with GM, turnover is as high as 8%, compared with 2% at Toyota's Japanese plants. Georgetown is the first large-scale Toyota plant outside Japan trying to take lessons from the new production system devised at the Tsutsumi plant. In one work area on Georgetown's No. 1 assembly line, where it builds a Camry or Avalon every 58 seconds, an operator used to have to make multiple decisions in choosing particular visors and seatbelts from the parts bin with 24 kinds of visors and nine different seatbelts, depending on a vehicle.

Georgetown wanted to limit the number of decisions an hourly worker makes to two or less per vehicle. So under a new system installed earlier this year after months of preparation, the same operator now receives parts for each vehicle in a small plastic container. In that container are a set of visors and seatbelts that match the car in front of the worker at that moment. The result: The operator makes "zero decisions" in picking parts, says John Stewart, a manager at Georgetown.

"This reduced the mental burden on our team members," says Mr. Stewart. In each work area, Mr. Stewart and other shop managers work on three areas: "smooth flow, memory simple and motion simple," he says.

Write to Norihiko Shirouzu at norihiko.shirouzu@wsj.com and Sebastian Moffett at sebastian.moffett@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...-email,00.html

03TL-S

looks like toyota is getting a little too ambitious in expanding the company that quality of vehicles is now becoming a concern. Quality is the only thing that people see toyota/lexus for and if thats gone, then the company is doomed.

SpeedyV6

Good point.

1SICKLEX

That is a main selling point but not the only thing at all.

heyitsme

Its kinda funny because Lutz predicted this a while ago in some article that was posted here.

dom

Global Gains: Toyota on course to capture worldwide sales lead from GM within three years - - By DALE JEWETT | Automotive News - - Source: Autoweek

Posted Date: 5/16/05

Toyota Motor Corp. last year took a big bite out of General Motors' lead as the world's No. 1 automaker.

Toyota gained by nearly 600,000 vehicles on GM to close to within 1.38 million sales in 2004, according to Automotive News' annual ranking of the world's automakers by sales and production.

That puts Toyota on a path to catch GM within two or three years if the trend holds.

Nearly a third of last year's gain came from the United States, where Toyota increased sales by 193,735 units while GM declined by 59,323 units.

Toyota, which passed Ford Motor Co. last year, has been taking ever-increasing chunks out of GM's lead. The Japanese juggernaut drew 413,605 units closer to GM in 2003 after narrowing the gap by 254,357 units in 2002. Last year, it cut 586,999 units from GM's 2003 sales lead.

Still, it ain't over till it's over.

"Right now, there is not enough evidence to say it is inevitable that Toyota will pass GM," says analyst Jeff Brodoski of J.D. Power and Associates in Troy, Mich. "The bigger factor that Toyota hangs its hat on is profitability. Even though they trail GM in sales, nobody comes close to Toyota in profits."

Growing everywhere

GM sold 8,089,551 units in 2004 -- a slim 50,000 over 2003.

That's equal to a 13.2 percent share of the global vehicle market (including manufacturers selling at least 10,000 units annually) and down from a share of 13.8 percent in 2003. Toyota's worldwide sales notched up 10.5 percent to 6,707,600 -- a global share of 10.9 percent.

In 2002, GM held 14.7 percent of the world vehicle market, compared with Toyota's 10.6 percent.

Michael Robinet, vice president for global forecast services at CSM Worldwide in Farmington Hills, Mich., expects Toyota will hold a 14.0 percent share of the world's auto sales by 2010.

"Toyota is growing everywhere," Robinet says. "It's not just an onslaught in North America or Europe."

The key is that Toyota is investing heavily to simultaneously attack markets around the world, he says.

"Toyota is an expansion automaker, trying to grow in its home market as well as other markets," Robinet says. "GM is really under assault in its home markets of the United States and Europe. It's trying to escape to other markets where gaining share could be easier, but it is encountering Toyota and others there as well."

Paul Ballew, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis, says the automaker concedes nothing.

"We have no plans to give up the No. 1 title," Ballew says. "Toyota is a formidable competitor, and there are several other formidable competitors out there. But if we focus on growth and improving the business, we will be successful. Maybe next year we'll break the 9 million mark."

Ford fell to third last year with a global share of 10.5 percent -- down sharply from 11.2 percent in 2003. It was the only company in the world's top 10 to see sales drop.

Volkswagen AG and DaimlerChrysler AG rank fourth and fifth in the 2004 rankings.

Alliance power

There are other ways to view the race, though. Ford's total does not include Mazda Motor Corp., which Ford controls via a 34 percent ownership stake. Add Mazda to Ford's totals and Toyota drops back to No. 3.

Throw in GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co. Ltd. of Incheon, South Korea, and another 900,084 units is added to the GM column in 2004. Automotive News' tally of GM's sales does not include GM Daewoo because GM doesn't own at least 50 percent of the automaker.

Yet GM Daewoo is accelerating faster than any carmaker. Sales increased 55.2 percent in 2004. If GM pushes its stake above 50 percent, GM Daewoo's volume will be consolidated in GM's accounts -- at the very least delaying Toyota's ascension.

Ballew says GM Daewoo should be included in GM's total because most of its vehicles are sold with a Chevrolet badge. GM also has management control of the company.

In fact, if automakers are ranked as groups, based on ownership and operational control, the top five would be: GM, Ford Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp., Renault SA/Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. and VW AG.

Even without majority ownership, "these groups are working in concert with one another," says CSM's Robinet. "That's the way the supply base sees it when they have to bid on global platforms."

Add GM's various other alliances, including minority stakes in Fuji Heavy Industries, Suzuki and Isuzu, and the extended GM family could be clear of Toyota for many years.

Hyundai is hot

Among the companies charging up the ladder are Hyundai Automotive Group (which may pass Honda this year); BMW AG (closing in on collapsing Mitsubishi Motors Corp.); and Nissan, which is ripe to overtake PSA/Peugeot-Citroen SA.

Hyundai Automotive, which includes Kia, has passed a threshold -- 5 percent of the world market. The South Korean company reached 5.2 percent in 2004. Hyundai Automotive together with GM Daewoo make up one of the world's fastest growing national lineups.

J.D. Power's Brodoski says the Korean automakers are moving aggressively to increase their market share.

With a portfolio of new, higher-quality products and an expanding manufacturing base, the Koreans "are like the sleeper threat," he says.

Global industrywide sales of all vehicles last year, including heavy trucks and buses, totaled 61,387,595. That was up 5.5 percent from 58,184,781 in 2003 and compares with 58,324,475 in 2002. The figures include only vehicle manufacturers with sales of at least 10,000 units annually.

Japanese companies accounted for 30.9 percent of the total -- a gain of 0.8 percentage points of share from 2003.

European automakers' share last year held steady at 33.5 percent, while North American automakers lost 1.4 percentage points of share from 2003 to hold 24.0 percent of sales in 2004.

Chinese automakers increased their share of global sales by 0.1 percentage points to 3.8 percent. But sales growth in China slowed to 7.4 percent in 2004 from a 36.5 percent gain in 2003 as the government put the brakes on sales via restrictions on credit.

Indian automakers did better last year, gaining 0.2 percentage points in 2004 to hold 1.0 percent of the market, with sales topping 600,000. In fact, two of the three fastest growing automakers in the world last year were Indian -- Tata Motors Ltd. and Mahindra & Mahindra.

Infamous425

wow hyundai might pass honda...

Fibonacci

No surprises here...had to rent a Chevy Malibu today for work - the only midsize left - what a POS.

Let me point out the most annoying features:
1. Loud, obnoxious ecotec engine.
2. Uncomfortable drivers seat with little if any lumbar support.
3. Styling that makes current gen accord look sexy in comparison.
4. Window/door plastic seal already unseated and exposed.

Sad, sad - if this is what a Chevy REVOLUTION means...

No wonder why Toyota is eating the General's lunch.

gavriil

Wow sounds pretty bad for the Malibu.

Moog-Type-S

Yup! Hyundai is gonna be right behind Toyota at the rate they are improving.

machination

Big deal if they do. With the most boring cars on the road, no one will even notice.

They'll only care when grandmothers in their avalons or librarians in corollas are blocking the fast lane.

Infamous425

uh... yes it is a pretty big deal. consider GM's long history and success and now lack of success... 10 yrs ago nobody wouldve thought a japanese company would overtake GM. i think its a great accomplishment for toyota.

Fibonacci

No '90s Flashback for Toyota
With the Japanese carmaker now a key U.S. manufacturer, any calls for sanctions aren't likely to be heeded


While China is now the sum of all fears among many in the West on trade matters, in the early 1990s it was Japan -- particularly its auto industry -- that inspired fear and loathing. Indeed, in 1995, the U.S. and Japan almost slipped into an acrimonious trade war over Japanese auto exports and parts purchases. Advertisement

Back then, trade hawks in Washington cast Toyota (TM ) in the role of archvillain. Some saw the carmaker's rapid market-share gains, export growth into the U.S., and heavy use of its own suppliers as signs of a predatory strategy. In the end, both governments pulled back from the abyss, but the lesson Toyota executives took away was simple: Never again would the company's lucrative franchise in the U.S. be vulnerable to trade sanctions.

Soon after, then-Toyota President Hiroshi Okuda launched a massive ramp-up of production in the U.S. and Canada, as well as a parts-purchasing program. His goal: to insulate Toyota from any future criticism and the potential for another trade backlash should General Motors (GM ) or Ford (F ) find itself in trouble.

BACK TO THE FUTURE? Flash forward to 2005: GM and Ford, saddled with heavy legacy costs from their legions of retirees, have had their credit ratings slashed by Standard & Poor's to junk status. Their last profit refuge -- high-margin sports utility vehicles -- is under attack by Toyota and other Asian carmakers. A future bankruptcy filing by GM can't be ruled out. By contrast, Toyota recently reported record earnings of about $11 billion for the fiscal year ended in March. Should Fujio Cho, Toyota's current boss, fear that it's 1995 all over again?

Probably not. Sure, GM CEO Rick Wagoner has tried to make the case that Toyota, Nissan, and Honda owe some of their success to currency rigging by the Japanese government, which has intervened in recent years to prevent the yen from rapidly appreciating against the dollar. And other car companies and media pundits have suggested it's somehow unfair that Toyota and its Japanese peers aren't burdened with unionized plants in the U.S. or the profit-draining retirement costs that confront GM and Ford.

Yet the Bush Administration, which just slapped quotas on some Chinese textiles, has shown little interest in arguing for trade restraint on Japanese autos. The reason: Toyota is now so deeply entrenched in the U.S. manufacturing economy that punishing it for its success would damage the U.S. economy.

HOT WHEELS. Consider the following: Toyota's direct investment in North America to date is some $16.6 billion. It currently employs 37,000 people throughout the region. Toyota's purchases of parts, materials, goods, and services from regional suppliers tops more than $25 billion a year. By next year, the company will have the capacity to build 1.66 million cars and trucks a year, as well as some 1.44 million engines in North America.

And its North American plants turn out some of Toyota's most popular models: the Avalon, Camry, Corolla, Matrix, Sienna, Solara, Sequoia, Tacoma, Tundra, and the Lexus RX 330. Given all this, it's hard to make the case that Toyota and other Japanese rivals are engaging in mercantile trade practices to unfairly savage its rivals in Detroit. Indeed, what's good for Toyota is good for the U.S. and Canada.

The Japanese companies' edge really boils down to their ability to turn out cars that consumers love and the rapidity with which they seize new markets. Case in point: the environmentally friendly hybrid-engine cars, a segment Toyota now dominates. And I don't think Japan is likely to cede market share anytime soon, despite recent suggestions by Okuda -- now Toyota's chairman -- that Japanese auto makers should dial back their ambitions in North America to give GM and Ford breathing space at home.

POWERFUL LEVERAGE. Toyota, which has already surpassed Ford as the No. 2 auto maker in terms of global unit sales, has set its sights on GM. And the odds are pretty good that before the decade is out, Toyota will be No. 1. Cho has set very ambitious 2005 growth targets in North America, though Toyota is open to technology collaboration with GM in some areas, such as fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

The bottom line is this: It's very unlikely that either the Bush Administration or the following one will ever slap punitive trade quotas on Toyota -- or any other Japanese auto maker -- to slow them down. First, American consumers love the quality of their cars. But more importantly, these companies are now major employers in the U.S. manufacturing sector. That's the kind of leverage that usually quiets the trade hawks in Washington.

http://businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnfl...8381_db087.htm

machination

OK, you stay on that side of the fence. I'll stay over here with those with a pulse and a brain, who appreciate real cars and not appliances on wheels.

gilboman

so what do you drive, i certainly hope not some FWD 4 cylinder appliance

titan

Hehehe

titan

Toyota is a beast... This is the state of a truly global market. GM should be soo far ahead of the competiton.

Infamous425

chevy cavalier?

chungkopi

the global anti-americanism is playing a big role IMO. in england, they hate americans more than ever before because not only because of war, but the glazer family bought Manchester United.