Toyota Motor Corp, Japan’s biggest carmaker, is cutting production in China as sales slow.
The carmaker is reducing daily output in China, Toyota spokesman Hideaki Homma said yesterday by telephone, declining to detail the scale of the reduction or name the models affected.
The carmaker will reduce output of passenger cars by about 10 percent at its factory in Guangdong Province, the Nikkei Shimbun reported earlier yesterday.
Toyota will slow the pace of production for at least a few months, the newspaper said.
China’s passenger car sales fell 6.2 percent last month, the first decline in more than three years.
Sales may fall short of a forecast 10 million this year as slowing economic growth and a slumping stock market undermine consumer purchasing power, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said.
Toyota’s sales goal of 700,000 units in China this year hasn’t changed, Homma said.
Toyota, which has suspended some production lines in the US for three months as a result of the market downturn, said last week its overseas output dropped by 16.4 percent last month from a year earlier to 306,299 vehicles.
Its domestic production also fell 14.7 percent from a year earlier to 320,446 vehicles, because of the weak economy and signs that Japanese are losing interest in owning cars in big cities.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY AFP
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