Toyota quarterly profit drops by 18.5%

Toyota said its quarterly profit slid by 18.5 per cent to $1bn on plunging sales caused by parts shortages from the tsunami disaster in northeastern Japan and warned it faces a new challenge from flooding in Thailand.Toyota Motor Corporation declined Tuesday to give a forecast for the full financial year ending March 2012. Associated Press reported on Tuesday, that the company cited uncertainties stemming from the Thai floods which had disrupted supplies of parts and prompted it to cut some car production. Toyota, Japans top automaker, said that vehicle sales plunged in the key markets of Japan and North America, but it was making up for some of the losses by strong sales in Asia, such as India and Indonesia. Toyotas quarterly sales fell by nearly five per cent from a year earlier to $58.7bn. All the Japanese automakers are suffering after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan damaged key parts suppliers. That meant they made and sold fewer cars than normal. The Thai floods, which began in July and now threaten central Bangkok, are compounding the production damage. The country is the Southeast Asian base for several automakers. Toyota said production cuts in Japan, which began last month, will continue through November 18. Toyota, which makes the Prius hybrid, Camry sedan and Lexus luxury models, counted on the dollar costing 86 yen last year, but is now seeing it slip to 78 yen. Toyota President, Mr. Akio Toyoda, said earlier this week that the strong yen was reaching levels "far beyond what is tolerable," threatening to make it necessary to move production out of Japan. He asked that the government do more to prop up the dollar, stressing that manufacturing in Japan would be "destroyed," not just hollowed out, which the common term to describe production, is moving out of Japan. Toyota said the unfavorable exchange rate erased $1bn from its latest quarterly net income. Toyota, which was the worlds biggest automaker in annual vehicle sales last year, sank to third place in the first half of this year, trailing US rival General Motors Company and Volkswagen AG of Germany. Toyota had shown tremendous ability to bounce back after the March disaster, reaching pre-tsunami levels of global production in September, faster than its initial expectation of recovering by the end of this year. But then the floods in Thailand struck and are expected to cost Toyota tens of thousands of vehicles in lost production.
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