Shoichiro "scolded" the president for being so anxious to boost sales and profits that he’d let Toyota emulate now bankrupt General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
Toyota had become addicted to big, expensive cars and trucks and had forgotten the customers’ need to save money, Shoichiro said, according to the person’s account.
On a mild day in February, Toyota Motor Corp.’s honorary chairman, Shoichiro Toyoda, summoned 400 executives to the redbrick factory in Nagoya, Japan, where his grandfather had built weaving looms a century ago.
The managers filed in for one of the customary updates from Toyota’s gray-haired, 84-year-old patriarch. What they got was anything but ordinary.
Two months earlier, Toyota had forecast its first operating loss since Shoichiro’s father began making cars in the same factory, now turned museum, in 1937. Then in January, about three months earlier than planned, the company announced that Shoichiro’s son, Akio, would replace Katsuaki Watanabe as president. Akio is scheduled to assume his new job at a shareholder meeting Tuesday in Toyota City.
Read Article