A senior Toyota executive has acknowledged concerns there may be a political backlash in the US as the automaker’s booming success there contrasts starkly with woes facing Detroit-based rivals.
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The Associated Press (AP) said that, in recent months, US lawmakers from manufacturing states have charged that the Japanese government has kept the yen artificially low, giving exporters like Toyota an advantage, and that many vehicles Japanese automakers sell in the US are still imported.
While American consumer attitudes are generally accepting of Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers as they have expanded production in the US [Toyota only recently opened a new truck plant in Texas and more factories are planned], fears of a backlash are emerging as Toyota moves close to overtaking General Motors as the world’s top vehicle maker.
“We are certainly concerned,” Toyota senior adviser Hiroshi Okuda, credited with successfully leading the Japanese automaker to global growth during his tenure as president and then chairman from 1995 to 2006, told the news agency.
Okuda reportedly said Toyota needs to “significantly” increase the number of foreigners on its 25-member board, now at zero, and boost foreign ownership of the company from about 20% today, to win greater acceptance as a global company. He did not give specific targets, AP noted.
According to the report, Okuda denied Toyota was making the top spot a goal, and said it was merely trying to satisfy customers.
“We have just been doing our job naturally, and the numbers merely came about as a result,” he told the Associated Press at an American Chamber of Commerce award ceremony in Japan.
AP said the organization chose Okuda as the 2006 ‘Person of the Year’ for contributing to US-Japan relations, creating thousands of jobs in the US and investing aggressively in the US.
“We have never said Toyota wants to be No. 1, and we do not give such orders to our employees,” Okuda reportedly told the gathering at a Tokyo hotel.
AP said Toyota’s global vehicle production topped 9m in 2006, at 9.018m vehicles, marking the fifth year straight of growth. GM its group automakers produced 9.18m vehicles worldwide in 2006 – about 162,000 vehicles more than its Japanese rival.
However, the news agency noted that Toyota has long beaten GM in profitability.
The report said criticism of Toyota has grown in recent months and senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat representing Michigan, home to many of the Big Three autoworkers, has accused the Japanese government of manipulating the yen.
“It creates big differences in what they can sell their automobiles for,” she reportedly said recently. “Most of their vehicles are still coming from Japan.”
AP said that, in a letter last month to US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, four Democrat politicians said the weakened yen had allowed Japanese automakers to increase their exports to the United States by more than 30% in 2006.
The report said even though the automaker will win points in Washington for last month choosing Mississippi for a new assembly plant, its eighth in North America, US legislators who criticize Toyota say 46% of its US sales in 2006 came from vehicles imported from Japan.
Earlier this week, Jim Press, Toyota’s North American president, said in Detroit that Toyota won’t change its business plan despite worries about a possible political backlash, the Associated Press noted.
