Akio Toyoda, a leading candidate to succeed Toyota Motor Corp. President Katsuaki Watanabe, is a member of the famed family that founded the company and still holds considerable sway, but hasn’t been in the driver’s seat since 1995.
Mr. Toyoda, one of Toyota’s five executive vice presidents, is a grandson of Kiichiro Toyoda, who launched Toyota in 1937. According to people familiar with the matter, a group of influential Toyota elders is leaning toward selecting 52-year-old Akio as Mr. Watanabe’s replacement.
Since the late 1960s, Toyota’s founding family dominated in steering the company. Founder Kiichiro’s cousin, Eiji Toyoda, served as president from 1967 to 1982. Shoichiro Toyoda, Kiichiro’s eldest son, was president from 1982 to 1992, and his brother, Tatsuro Toyoda, served that role from 1992 to 1995.
But that changed in 1995, when Tatsuro suffered a stroke and had to be replaced. In part because there were no suitable senior family members available, Toyota chose Hiroshi Okuda, a charismatic executive with a sales background and the first outsider to run the company in almost three decades.
He swiftly turned around the company, which had struggled under Tatsuro’s watch. Tatsuro, among other challenges, struggled to fend off attempts by foreign investors to take over some of Toyota’s affiliates and Mr. Okuda quickly boosted stakes in Toyota’s related companies to protect the group against hostile bidders.
The whole experience in the mid-1990s led to internal soul-searching about whether the Toyoda family should automatically be handed the reins to a public company when the clan collectively owns less than 2% of the stock.
To be sure, some of the senior Toyoda family members, such as Akio’s father, Shoichiro Toyoda, still wield influence by retaining a seat on the board. Those elders questioned Toyota management’s decision earlier this year to build an eighth North American vehicle assembly plant in Mississippi. They felt the car maker may have erected too many U.S. factories, a strategy aimed in part at building political support by providing new jobs in lots of places.
Akio, one of just a handful of family members serving as senior executives in the Toyota group, has been groomed by some in the company to take over Toyota one day. When asked several years ago in an interview whether he aimed to be president, he demurred but made clear he had big ambitions. “Whether I am going to be president in the future or not, it’s the founding family’s mission to keep setting direction for the company,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
