Toyota Motor Corp stayed at the top in global vehicle sales last year — taking that auto industry crown for the third consecutive year — but is less upbeat about this year.
The Japanese automaker sold 10.23 million vehicles, beating Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co (GM). However, it expects to sell fewer trucks and cars this year, forecasting that sales will fall 1 percent year-on-year to 10.15 million vehicles, according to numbers it released yesterday.
The drop is largely due to a projected 9 percent plunge in sales in Japan. Japanese sales had been inflated in the early part of last year ahead of a sales-tax hike. Overall, the Japanese auto market is weakening because of the nation’s population decline.
Photo: Bloomberg
Toyota expects overseas sales to grow by 2 percent from 7.9 million vehicles last year to more than 8 million vehicles this year.
Germany’s Volkswagen sold 10.14 million vehicles last year, up 4 percent from the previous year. Detroit-based GM was third with 9.92 million vehicles, a company record and 2 percent higher than its tally in 2013. GM gave its numbers earlier this month.
Selling 10 million vehicles around the world in a year is a milestone for major automakers. The race is intense, as automakers increasingly compete in new markets.
Toyota’s sales grew by 6 percent in the US from the previous year, 13 percent in China and 10 percent in Brazil, the maker of the Camry sedan, Prius hybrid and Lexus luxury models reported.
Toyota suffered a setback in 2011, when its production was hobbled by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, but it made a comeback as No. 1 in 2012.
GM had been the top-selling automaker for more than seven decades until being surpassed by Toyota in 2008.
However, it is Volkswagen that has been racking up stellar growth in recent years, beating GM last year and in 2013. Still, that year, GM would have won if both companies had been compared without the sales of industrial truck brands, which GM does not make.
Last year, Volkswagen outsold GM even without its heavy trucks, which totaled 199,900 vehicles. Toyota’s Hino division, which makes trucks, sold 168,000 vehicles last year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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