Toyota expects bigger share

Toyota Motor Corp. expects to gain U.S. market share, but it will not match last year’s U.S. sales record, a top executive said Thursday.

Bob Carter, group vice president and general manager of Toyota’s U.S. sales arm, said 2008 will be the first time in 17 years that Toyota will not beat the prior year’s total sales in the United States.

“As the sales and marketing representative, I’d love to have 18, but it’s just not realistic in this environment,” Carter said.

Toyota sold more than 2.6 million Toyota, Lexus and Scion cars and trucks in the United States last year. This year, Carter said, Toyota believes it will sell up to 2.45 million vehicles, a decrease of at least 5.7%.

Industrywide sales declined 10.5% for the first seven months of the year, according to Autodata Corp.

“We will not match 2007 sales,” Carter said. “But our share will grow: We will have a bigger piece of a smaller pie.”

For the first seven months of the year, Toyota’s U.S. market share is 16.8%, up from 16.3%.

For Toyota, the first seven months of 2008 have been somewhat painful. Profits have dropped, the company has struggled to make enough small cars to supply its dealers with adequate inventory and it has announced unprecedented changes to its production plans.

At the end of July, Carter said, the days of supply on dealers’ lots was estimated at 10 days or fewer for six of Toyota’s cars.

Still, the company reported fiscal first-quarter net income of more than $3.2 billion last week, and its flexible manufacturing systems have provided the company with the ability to change quickly.

In an interview, Carter said he is confident that the pickup segment will eventually rebound even as he said Toyota has canceled plans to restart production of the Tundra full-size pickup in Princeton, Ind.

In July, Toyota said it planned to temporarily halt Tundra assembly from Aug. 7 to November before consolidating all Tundra production to its plant in San Antonio next spring. Now, Carter said, Tundra production will not resume in Indiana.

July’s Tundra announcement was part of a much broader set of production changes including that Toyota would build its Prius hybrid at a plant being built in Blue Springs, Miss., and would move the planned production of its Highlander SUV from Mississippi to Princeton, Ind.

“That allows us to get Highlander into production earlier than planned,” Carter said. “We were going to introduce Highlander production in 2010. Now, we will be introducing Highlander production here in 2009.”

Toyota declined to comment on the potential cost of those production changes, but Global Insight automotive analyst Haig Stoddard said it could cost the company as much as $1 billion.

Carter said Toyota’s light-truck sales are beginning to bounce back, but totals will still be far down for the year. He said full-size pickup sales fell slightly from about 2.5 million in 2005 to about 2.2 million last year and are on pace to drop to 1.45 million this year.

“That’s a huge swing. Frankly the industry has never seen that kind of a swing,” he said. “The core buyer right now of trucks is on the sidelines. I am very confident that core buyer is going to return.”

Carter also said he is confident that the U.S. automotive market will eventually return to previous record highs.

“We do see a time in the not-too-distant future that annual auto sales will reach 17 million vehicles again and probably go higher,” Carter said.

Source:Freep

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