Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, said yesterday it would further suspend production in Japan to cope with slumping global demand and mounting inventories of unsold vehicles.
Toyota Motor Corp is already shutting down output for 14 days at its 11 domestic plants during the first three months of this year.
But facing sluggish sales and rising inventories, Toyota spokesman Yuta Kaga said the firm had decided to halt production again in April for three days at the 11 factories.
“We are responding to demand in the global market and also need to reduce our inventories,” Kaga said.
Toyota’s domestic output in the January-March period of this year is seen at 520,000, down 54 percent from the same period last year.
Kaga declined to give details on Toyota’s domestic output plan in May, but said the company forecast a rise in production in the month because of an expected fall in inventories and the launch of a new model.
Earlier in the month, Toyota said it would incur a net loss of ¥350 billion (US$3.72 billion) for the fiscal year through March because of plunging demand for cars, especially in the US, and the strong yen, which cuts its overseas earnings.
The dismal forecast, the first annual net loss since 1950, was a stunning reversal from the record ¥1.72 trillion profit it posted the previous year.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
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