Toyota’s president reportedly said on Monday that a tie-up with rival General Motors on fuel-cell vehicles is in its final stages – but promised to do his best to beat GM and Ford.
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“They are good competition,” Katsuaki Watanabe said of General Motors and Ford in a group interview with foreign media, including the Associated Press (AP). “We don’t want to lose.”
AP noted that Watanabe, 63, whose appointment was approved at a shareholders’ meeting last month, is taking helm as the Japanese automaker is on track potentially to surpass GM, the world’s largest car maker, in global sales.
Toyota aims to capture 15% of the world’s market in the years following 2010, the report added. Depending on how the rivals fare, that could put Toyota ahead of GM.
Watanabe reportedly said it’s just a matter of time before details can be hammered out for a deal with GM on fuel cells – a clean technology that is still largely experimental.
The news agency said GM and Toyota have a long-running partnership that does not involve stakes in each other – they run a plant together in California [and, at one time, shared vehicle lines with GM’s Australian arm Holden] and have a 1999 pact to share technology. A deal on fuel cell vehicles would be an important expansion of that agreement, AP added.
“We are in the final stages of the talks,” Watanabe said at the company’s Tokyo office, according to the Associated Press. “It’s better not to let the talks drag on.”
The news agency said Toyota’s continued growth at a time when both GM and Ford are stumbling has set off some concerns in Japan about a possible backlash reminiscent of the trade tensions that emerged about two decades ago.
Watanabe reportedly brushed off the idea that Toyota may become the world’s top-selling automaker during his tenure, laughing that he hasn’t thought about it and he isn’t even really expecting it, either.
His main mission is to keep stable growth going without compromising on day-to-day efforts, including improving quality control, training workers around the world and cutting costs, he told the Associated Press.
He reportedly denied that fears of a backlash were behind Toyota’s recent decision to raise prices on several models in the United States, including the hot-selling Camry compact.
AP noted that Watanabe has a reputation for being both a cost-cutter and price-cutter, so the higher US prices appear to run counter to his overall strategy.
He told AP that Toyota looked at various factors such as costs, market conditions and profitability to make the decision, and the recent heavy discounting by US automakers was also studied – Toyota decided such discounts weren’t appropriate for their own cars.
“We looked at the total picture and made the decision. And we think we can put up the numbers” in sales, he told AP.
The Associated Press said Watanabe – who is a karaoke and baseball fan – said Toyota sees increasing hybrid production as key to expanding global sales – it is considering making a hybrid pickup truck, and the ideal would be an entire line-up of models in hybrids.
