Toyota kept its title as the world’s biggest automaker after posting global sales of 10.15 million vehicles for last year, outpacing scandal-hit Volkswagen and US rival General Motors (GM).
Struggling to move past a pollution cheating scandal, Volkswagen earlier said it logged sales of 9.93 million vehicles worldwide last year, while Chevrolet and Cadillac maker GM moved 9.8 million.
In the first half of the year, the German giant was in pole position, outpacing Toyota as it rode momentum in emerging economies. It then posted its first drop in annual sales for more than a decade, as it was hammered by a massive pollution cheating scandal.
Photo: AFP
Volkswagen sank into its biggest crisis over stunning revelations in September that it had fitted 11 million of its vehicles with devices designed to dodge pollution tests.
The US government has said it was suing Volkswagen for US$20 billion in civil penalties over the scandal.
Toyota broke GM’s decades-long reign as the world’s top automaker in 2008, but lost it three years later to the US firm, as Japan’s earthquake-tsunami disaster dented production and disrupted supply chains.
However, in 2012, it once again overtook its Detroit rival and has remained on top since, despite slowing sales in its home market where a weak economy has taken a bite out of demand.
Toyota’s overall sales — which include its Daihatsu and Hino brands — edged down 0.8 percent from a year ago.
Rival Nissan yesterday said its global sales hit a calendar-year record 5.42 million units, up 2.1 percent from 2014.
Toyota’s upbeat announcement yesterday comes despite the firm struggling to recover its reputation for safety after the recall of millions of cars around the world for various problems, including an exploding air bag crisis at supplier Takata.
At least 10 deaths globally and scores of injuries have been linked to the faulty airbags fitted in cars made by some of the world’s leading auto giants.
Toyota, maker of the Camry sedan and Prius hybrid, had stopped building new plants for several years and turned its focus to quality rather than sales volume.
The company is also overhauling its production methods, vowing to slash development costs to try to offset any downturn in the market and squeeze more productivity out of existing plants.
Toyota is pushing further into the fast-growing market for environmentally friendly cars, especially in China, where officials are struggling to contain an air pollution crisis.
It has also released its first mass-market hydrogen fuel-cell car, the Mirai, in a bid to tap the green market.
Volkswagen’s new chief executive has said his firm was abandoning its ambition to become the world’s biggest carmaker.
“For me, this obsession with unit sales and the ambition to constantly reach new records makes no sense,” Matthias Mueller told the weekly WirtschaftsWoche in an interview published last month. “I’m not going declare sheer size as an end in itself.”
His predecessor, Martin Winterkorn, had focused on Volkswagen overtaking Toyota as the world’s biggest carmaker by 2018.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day