Could this week get any worse for Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe? Yesterday, Watanabe took the unusual step of announcing a huge profits revision at a year-end press conference which is held every December in Nagoya. It was so unusual, in fact, that Toyota now projects it will make its first ever operating loss in the fiscal year ending March 2009. “The speed, breadth and depth of the downturn is beyond what we had imagined,” Watanabe told reporters.
Today, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun is reporting that Toyota will replace Watanabe, 66, with Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda in April.
According to the Asahi report, the appointment of a family member to the top job would help unify the company at a crucial time. If it was to happen, Toyoda, 52, would be the first family member to lead the company since Tatsuro Toyoda who stepped down in 1995. The newspaper calls the return of a family member “taisei hoken”—a reference to the restoration of imperial rule in Japan in 1868. Toyota denies the story and says nothing has been decided.
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