Toyota is expected to sell 8.3m vehicles worldwide in 2008, down from 8.43m last year, an unsourced report in the Japanese business daily Nikkei said.
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The paper predicted Toyota’s total group sales would dip to 9.3m units this year, including minicar affilate Daihatsu and truck maker Hino, compared with 9.37m in 2007.
Japan’s Kyodo News, citing “informed sources”, also published similar data on Wednesday, saying that falling sales in key markets were behind the expected fall.
Kyodo noted that Toyota had steadily increased its worldwide annual sales by over 500,000 units for the past five years since 2003.
But its sales in the US – the key export market – were off almost 30% last month and down just over 10% year to date to 1.79m, according to WardsAuto.com data.
For the group as a whole, the expected 2008 fall would mark the first year-on-year drop since the current data-gathering method was adopted in 2001, Kyodo said.
Toyota initially set a global sales target of 8.84m units in 2008 on a parent company basis, up 5% year on year, but falling US sales prompted a revision last July to 8.5m, up just 1%.
Kyodo News said Toyota’s Japan sales fell 18.9% in August while poorer economic conditions and price rises are seen keeping sales there sluggish.
The sales slump will also hit the automaker’s profits. According to news agency AFP, an unsourced report in the Tokyo Shimbun paper said Toyota estimates operating profit of 1.0-1.2 trillion yen ($US10-12bn ) this fiscal year, down from 2.27 trillion the previous year.
Toyota had said in August that it expected a 29.5% decline in annual operating profit to 1.6 trillion yen, AFP noted.
The company now believes a deeper decline is inevitable as the global financial crisis has hit the auto market and boosted the yen, which is bad for overseas earnings, the daily was reported to have said.
A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment to AFP.
The automaker is expected to announce second quarter results on 6 November.
