Toyota Motor Europe’s executive vice-president with responsibility for sales and marketing has told just-auto that it is too early to say how much damage has been done to Toyota in Europe due to its highly publicised recalls and quality concerns.
Speaking at the Geneva Motor Show amid reports that Toyota sales in Europe suffered a big decline in February, Didier Leroy said that the picture for the firm’s sales will become clearer after the March and April figures have been seen.
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He did, however, concede that the February sales figures for Toyota ‘will not be good’.
Leroy said that weakness in a number of national markets – notably Italy, Germany and Greece – would be one factor that would adversely impact Toyota sales.
And he said that the accelerator pedal recall would impact Toyota because of a self-imposed halt to sales when the recall began.
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“At the beginning of the recall we decided to stop deliveries of affected models. For a period between 2-3 days and 1 week, deliveries to customers were completely halted as the repair activities began. That will have a direct impact on our new registrations in February.”
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By GlobalDataLeroy says that it is much more complicated to assess the direct impact of the recall publicity on potential customers for Toyota cars.
But he says that their analysis of existing Toyota customers is very positive.
“The feedback from our current customers is very positive. They trust the company and the way we deal with this kind of problem,” he maintains. “They will stay with us for the future.”
He is looking for sales in the coming months to indicate the competitive hit that Toyota will take.
“For potential conquest customers it is much more difficult to evaluate. Some will ‘wait and see’ to really understand the problem. I strongly believe that sales in March and April will be very strong indicators for us in this respect – much more so than the month of February. The magnitude of the impact is difficult to predict currently.
“So far we have really focused on repair activity as a priority, but now we are returning to more normal business, promoting the product and so on, so we will really see start to see what the impact on sales is.”
Leroy is cautious on where Toyota’s sales for the year in Europe will end up and points out that the company was already planning on a slight decline to 840,000 units (877,000 in 2009) in the context of a declining overall market.
“We thought the overall market would drop by between 5 and 10 percent. We now think the drop will be nearer to 10 percent at a pan-European level.”
Is he sticking to the 840,000-unit projection? “Let’s see how the March and April figures look,” he emphasises, firmly rejecting the notion of any supply push or discounting to get to a sales target.
“That is not our strategy. We have to rebuild trust with our potential customers. We have to convince them that we have the best cars currently in the market in Europe. And we should show them clearly that we will continue to improve our quality and that they should not have safety doubts with Toyota. There will be no discounting.”
Dave Leggett
