TOKYO -- Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said his money-losing automaker is “grasping for salvation” as it struggles to return to profit.
The world's largest car company was once targeting annual sales of 10 million vehicles but now expects sales of 7.3 million this year, down from 8.97 million in 2008, Toyoda said at a news conference here today.
Toyoda, grandson of the automaker's founder, said Toyota is on the brink of “capitulation to irrelevance or death” as he prepares for a second-straight year of substantial financial and unit-sale decreases.
Citing the five stages of corporate decline outlined by Jim Collins, author of How the Mighty Fall, the Toyota chief warned that his company has slumped to stage four.
“We are grasping for salvation,” Toyoda said, adding that the company has already spiraled through the first three stages: Hubris born of success, undisciplined pursuit of more and denial of risk and peril.
“Toyota has become too big and distant from its customers,” the chief executive said.
In the United States, Toyota's sales fell 13 percent in September from a year earlier as the market suffered a sharp letdown after the government-funded cash-for-clunkers program ran out. Total U.S. sales tumbled 23 percent. Toyota is down 28 percent for the year.
Separately, Toyoda called the current dollar-yen rate "very tough," saying the weak U.S. currency made it difficult to return to profit on an unconsolidated level.
"When you get to this level, it makes it difficult to return to profit on sales growth alone," he said.
Toyoda repeated Toyota's aim to return to profit at the parent level "as soon as possible," even as it expects global sales to fall 18 percent from 2008 to 7.34 million vehicles this year. That would leave about 30 percent of its production capacity unused.
Toyoda took the helm in June as the world's biggest automaker faced one of its biggest crises in history amid a global credit crunch and an industrywide sales slump that forced two U.S. automakers into bankruptcy.
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