Toyota Motor Corp. delayed its plans to become the world's first auto maker to sell more than 10 million vehicles annually, the latest sign that global auto makers are bracing for a long slowdown as robust sales to developing markets fail to offset losses in the crumbling U.S. market.
The Japanese auto maker, which is closing in on General Motors Corp. as the world's largest auto maker by sales volume, said Thursday that it aims to sell 9.7 million vehicles next year, backpedaling from the target of 10.4 million vehicles it set a year ago.
The lower target is a rare setback for Toyota, whose robust sales and profit growth this decade made it appear impervious to the challenges facing other auto makers, particularly the Big Three in Detroit.
It also underscored how the stagnation threatening the auto industry world-wide likely will continue well into next year.
'Things remain nebulous and uncertain,' Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe said.
When Toyota announced the sales target of 10.4 million last August, the company was confident that surging demand for new vehicles in fast-growing markets like China, India and Russia would make up for any softness in the U.S., which was souring amid the subprime crisis.
But the past 12 months have delivered more bad news for the auto industry than anyone imagined, making it difficult for Toyota and other auto makers to use emerging-market sales to offset huge U.S. losses. Sales of big trucks and sport-utility vehicles, once the cornerstone of the U.S. market, have plummeted as gas prices have soared. Prices are up for steel and other materials needed to build cars, eating into profits. Auto makers, including Toyota, are setting aside millions of dollars in leased-vehicle losses as used-car prices plummet.
Toyota last month cut its 2008 global sales forecast by 350,000 units to 9.5 million. Last year, it sold 9.37 million vehicles. Toyota says it expects demand in the U.S. to improve but it doesn't know when it might reach its goal of selling more than 10 million vehicles.
Toyota cut its 2009 sales target for North America to 2.7 million vehicles, down from its original target of 3.1 million. Even as sales of its trucks and SUVs have declined this year, Toyota continues to gain market share in the U.S. because of its lineup of smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles and the weakness of its Detroit rivals. Toyota held 16.8% of the U.S. auto market for January to July, up from 16.3% in the same period last year.
Toyota trimmed its 2009 Europe sales plan to 1.3 million units from 1.45 million. For Asia, the target dropped to 1.75 million from 1.9 million. In the Middle East, South America and other markets, sales projections increased to 1.7 million from 1.55 million.
Mr. Watanabe said that after years of rapid growth, Toyota would use this slower period to restructure its operations: making its production system in the U.S. more nimble to adjust to changing market demands, pushing deeper into the world's emerging markets and developing more hybrid cars and other fuel-efficient vehicles.
Toyota said that early next year it will unveil the next generation of its best-selling Prius hybrid and a new Lexus hybrid, part of its goal of selling one million hybrids a year in the early 2010s. While the focus of Toyota's future growth remains hybrid vehicles, Mr. Watanabe said that by early next decade, it would start producing an electric car, offering a challenge to the plans by Japanese rivals Nissan Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. to mass-produce electric vehicles in the next two years.
John Murphy
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