The word uncertainty was in the economy when the Toyota Motor management team presented the figures for the financial year ended at the end of March on Thursday. A all over time, the journalists gathered in Tokyo tried to ask what the consequences of the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump will have for the world’s most sales -strongest car company and how it wants to react. But CEO Koji Sato repeatedly said: “The future is currently difficult to predict.” The talks between the Japanese and the American government to the tariffs finally ran; Nobody can foresee how they went out. “We can then only try to react flexibly,” said Sato.Fakt that the tariffs of 25 percent have applied to auto imports to the United States since April. And the fact is that Toyota imports about half of the 2.7 million vehicles that the Japanese sell in their most important foreign market from Mexico, Canada or Japan. So the tariffs already have expensive effects. In the annual forecast presented on Thursday, they were incorporated from the operational annual profit with a minus of 180 billion yen (1.1 billion euros). And the tariffs were initially only taken into account in April and May. The Managers of Toyota apparently still hope that the negotiations between Tokyo and Washington could end with a decree of punitive tariffs. Higher material prices, for example, for the rare earths retained by China and a stronger yen could also burden the group in the current financial year. For example, Toyota expects a net profit of 3.1 trillion yen (19 billion euros) for the year that ends at the end of March 2026. That would be more than a good third less than the 4.8 trillion yen that the group shows for the past financial year. The Japanese are quite optimistic about the sales figures: from the core brand Toyota alone, they want to sell 9.8 million vehicles, i.e. 4.7 percent more than last year. In the past financial year, the group had to cope with a drop in profits in the United States in the past financial year, as the number template on Thursday showed. The operational profit in North America shrank from 525 billion to 104 billion yen throughout the financial year. The background was a comprehensive security problem with airbags in two important SUV models, of which Toyota had sold 145,000 vehicles. As a result, the factory in the US state of Indiana had to stand completely for four months. The Swiss bank UBS had the possible effects of tariffs for Japanese automakers in April on 3.5 trillion yen (21.5 billion euros). About half of it calculates analyst Kohei Takahashi Toyota. “The manufacturers will probably have to take measures, such as relocating production to the United States,” said Takahashi. However, Sato and his CFO YOICHI Miyazaki did not want to speak of further relocation of production to the USA on Thursday. “Making hasty decisions is not the kind of Toyota,” Miyazaki said more about a report by the Japanese economic newspaper “Nikkei”, Toyota already plans to expand its production of electric vehicles on more countries in the world in order to be less dependent on the respective trading regulations. According to this, the cars that have so far only been built in Japan and China are soon also being built in the USA, Thailand and Argentina.
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