Toyota has said that some 2,200 general managers may buy Toyota cars by the end of the financial year on March 31 in a ‘voluntary’ effort to help minimise earnings deterioration.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Japanese carmakers are coming under increasing pressure from the impact of lower overseas earnings and a depressed home market. Toyota is forecasting that it will post an almost unheard of operating loss for the year ended March 31.
No stones are being left unturned in the quest for extra sales and cost reductions.
“It’s not a corporate decision, but general managers apparently hammered out the voluntary programme through an informal meeting,” Toyota spokesman Keisuke Kirimoto told Reuters.
On the cost side, Toyota has already banned overtime work at production sites and will tell about 35,000 factory workers in Japan to stay home on reduced pay for two days in February and March, Reuters noted.
Evidence of additional effort to secure much-needed sales has also emerged at Mazda.
Mazda’s local Hiroshima prefectural government will buy 200 new cars from Mazda as its official cars.
The local government authority will buy the 200 Demio cars to be produced at Mazda’s main plant in the prefecture at a total cost of about 270 million yen to replace its old cars, the officials told the Kyodo news agency.
The purchase is included in a 5.2 billion yen supplementary budget for fiscal 2008 incorporating industrial and employment measures, they said.
