Toyota has a secret ambition to sell two million vehicles a year in Europe by 2015 but the goal is not public yet.
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“All I will say is that our aim is to sell 1.2 million vehicles a year in Europe by 2010,” said Takis Athanasopoulos, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Europe.
But a senior Toyota source who requested anonymity says the internal planning goal is annual sales of two million cars and commercial vehicles within the decade.
“We don’t say so in public, but that’s what we want to achieve,” the source said at a press briefing in London.
That sales level would put Toyota on a par with all major automotive groups in Europe except Volkswagen – and ahead of many.
“I suspect that’s a general ambition rather than a concrete business plan,” said Nigel Griffiths, automotive forecaster at Global Insight in London. “It would be a massive stretch. It implies Toyota will take 100% of the market growth between 2010 and 2015.”
Tom Aney, an auto analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Frankfurt, also was sceptical.
“[Established European automakers] aren’t going to give it away and you’ve got the Koreans coming in as well,” he said.
But competitors have learned not to under-estimate Toyota’s ability to meet ambitious goals. It reached its target of 800,000 European sales by 2005 in 2003. Athanasopoulos acknowledged Toyota may beat the 2010 goal of 1.2 million by “perhaps two years.”
Meeting Toyota’s philosophy of building vehicles where it sells them would require Toyota to substantially expand its manufacturing base in Europe.
“We have many choices to expand capacity,” said Shinichi Sasaki, the new president and CEO of Toyota Motor Europe. “We could build a new plant, but where? Or we could increase capacity in our current plants.”
The automaker must make some decisions on capacity by the end of this year or in early 2006, Sasaki added.
Toyota plans to produce 606,000 vehicles – up from 583,000 in 2004 – in Europe this year, plus 511,000 engines and 306,000 transmissions.
Toyota’s hopes for Europe are part of a broad push to achieve a global market share of 15%.
The Japanese automaker estimates it sold 515,000 vehicles across Europe in the first half of this year. That puts it ahead of schedule on its 2005 goal of 980,000. If it achieves that, it would be ninth consecutive record year.
Automotive News Europe
