Toyota, whose operations have been severely disrupted since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, said Wednesday that its quarterly profit fell 77 percent but that it expects production to begin recovering up to two months sooner than previously forecast.
Still, the automaker said it could not forecast earnings or production for the year ahead because of uncertainty about its ability to resume normal output levels.
¶Toyota said the disaster in Japan cut operating income by 110 billion yen ($1.36 billion) even though it occurred only three weeks before the end of the quarter.
¶The strong yen also hurt earnings in the period, when net income was 25.4 billion yen ($314 million), down from 112.2 billion yen a year earlier.
¶Toyota’s operating profit declined 52 percent, to 46.1 billion yen ($571.5 million), less than half the 96.1 billion yen that analysts had projected. Sales in the quarter fell 12 percent, to 4.6 trillion yen.
¶Its results in the current quarter — the first period of its fiscal year, which started April 1 — are expected to sustain a much bigger hit because of the earthquake. Toyota is almost certain to lose its title as the world’s largest automaker this year, perhaps falling to third place behind General Motors and Volkswagen.
¶Toyota said its production, which has been running at about 50 percent of normal globally and 30 percent in North America, would begin recovering in June across all regions of the world. Previously, it had said output would start to normalize in July in Japan and in August elsewhere.
¶It said production would continue to follow the schedule announced last month through June 3, then rise to about 70 percent of normal in June. It did not say whether plants would return to pre-disaster levels sooner than the November-to-December estimate given earlier.
¶The company said it hopes to release a sales and earnings forecast by the middle of June.
¶In a statement, Toyota said it is “carefully monitoring the situation in each region and for each vehicle model and is every day working its hardest to identify every way to restore production as much as possible” but that in the meantime, “reduced production levels may have a significant impact” on its financial results.
¶For the full fiscal year ended March 31, Toyota’s net profit grew 94 percent, to 408.1 billion yen ($5.1 billion), and operating income more than tripled, to 468.2 billion yen. Revenue rose 0.2 percent, to 18.993 trillion yen.
¶“Our business environment continued to be challenging due to yen appreciation among others,” Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, said on a conference call with analysts. “Nevertheless, we managed to improve our profit structure even further thanks to the support from all our stakeholders, in particular our customers.”
¶Toyota has been hurt by the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis in Japan more than other automakers because its domestic plants build about 43 percent of the vehicles it sells worldwide. Honda and Nissan each made less than 28 percent of their vehicles in Japan last year.
¶Few of the automakers’ plants and offices were directly affected by the disaster, but their supply chains have been devastated. Toyota suspended production at its Japanese plants until April 18, and their operations remain limited.
¶The disaster hit Toyota as that company was still working to recover from the damage done to its sales and reputation by recalling more than 14 million vehicles in the last two years to problems with accelerator pedals and floor mats that led to complaints about sudden acceleration.
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