SUBARU parent company Fuji Heavy Industries Limited has announced plans to expand its manufacturing capacity in North America while it lowered its long-term global sales targets.The company also said it no longer expects to start building cars in China as part of a five-year growth plan that runs until March 2016, and lowered its annual global sales target for that period by 50,000 vehicles.Fuji Heavy said it would add capacity at factories in the United States and Japan by a combined 45,000 vehicles per year by mid-2014, and would consider further expansion in North America beyond the mid-term plan.The Japanese automaker, according to Renters had mapped out the plan in July last year, aiming to boost global sales by 40 per cent to 900,000 vehicles by March 2016, driven in large part by a tripling in Chinese sales.The company explained that it would continue to import cars into China after an unsuccessful bid to obtain Chinese government approval for a joint venture with local car- maker Chery Automobile Co. to build Subaru cars there.Foreign automakers are required to partner with a Chinese company to produce cars for the local market, and Beijing recently tightened the approval process to favour ventures that plan to make technologically advanced vehicles such as hybrids and electric cars. A Chinese tariff of 25 percent on imported cars makes it difficult to sell in large volumes.'We haven't given up on local production in China,' President Yasuyuki Yoshinaga told a news conference.'We'll keep waiting patiently for any progress,' he said, conceding that plans to start building in the world's biggest car market next year were no longer realistic. He did not give a new target time frame for China production.Yoshinaga will take over as CEO of Fuji Heavy in June, when Ikuo Mori steps down to become an adviser.The niche maker of Legacy and other boxer-engine cars now expects to sell 850,000 vehicles in 2015/16, with stronger-than-expected sales in the United States offsetting part of the shortfall in China. The company now projects Chinese sales at 100,000 vehicles for that year, from an earlier 180,000 target.With earnings and vehicle sales in the plan's first year outpacing targets, Fuji Heavy maintained its operating profit target for the final year at 120 billion yen ($1.50 billion) and profit margin at 6 per cent. That is despite assumptions for a stronger Japanese currency, at 80 yen to the dollar and 105 yen to the euro. It previously assumed a more favorable dollar rate of 90 yen and euro of 120 yen.Fuji Heavy also reported that a 48 per cent year-on-year decline in operating profit to 44.0 billion yen for the fiscal year that ended March 30 as supply disruptions stemming from last year's earthquake in Japan interrupted brisk sales in the United States, its biggest market.The result was roughly in line with an average estimate for 43.3 billion yen from 19 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.For the year ending March 2013, the company forecast operating profit to rise 52 per cent to 67 billion yen and net profit to grow 25 per cent to 48 billion yen.
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