Toyota CEO hopeful of 10m vehicle sales

Akio Toyoda, chief executive officer of Toyota Motor Corporation, has disclosed that the automaker will sell 10 million vehicles this year up from 9.98m units it sold last year. This expression of optimism according to the company chief is Toyota Motor Corporation’s first step to ensure it stays on a growth path after achieving global sales of 10m units.

In his submission, “We have assigned six executive vice presidents to oversee the Toyota number one and number two divisions, ” Toyoda said. However, the executive does not expect brisk sales in all regions. In the United States, Toyota sales fell 4 percent in February to 159,284 units, but still, the Japanese automaker is the market leader.

Toyota, the largest carmaker in the world, has agreed to pay last week a $1.2bn penalty to end a US criminal probe into sudden unintended acceleration. The automaker recalled more than 10m vehicles in the United States. The penalty is the largest in the history of any carmaker in the world.

Last year, the maker of Camry sedan sold 9.98m units (up 2 percent compared to 2012), while competitor GM sold 9.71m vehicles and VW, Europe’s largest carmaker about 9.7m cars.

But the competition is getting more intense as VW already announced a year ago that plans to surpass General Motors and Toyota and become the world’s largest automaker by 2018.

Last year, Toyota Motor announced it expects to sell 8.7m vehicles and in December, it said it expects its Toyota and Lexus brands to sell 8.9m vehicles in 2013, up 2.5% from this year’s predicted sales. Including the figures from Daihatsu Motor and Hino Motors, Toyota expects to manufacture 9.94m vehicles and sell 9.91m units next year.

Then, the automaker‘s target was to manufacture 9.92m vehicles, an increase of 26 percent from 2012, showing a quick recovery from the natural disasters which hit Japan and Thailand in 2011, disrupting production. Toyota sees its group-wide global sales for this year reach 9.7m units, an increase of 22 percent.

Mike Ochonma