Toyota Motor has raised its production target for this year and plans to start buying batteries from Sanyo Electric to meet brisk demand for its hybrid vehicles, news reports said yesterday.
The world’s largest automaker now aims to produce 5.95 million Toyota-brand vehicles this year, up from a previous goal of 5.8 million, the Nikkei Shimbun business daily and other media reported without naming sources.
Toyota is enjoying brisk demand for its remodeled Prius, which has been Japan’s top-selling car in recent months as government incentives spur strong demand for fuel-efficient vehicles.
STRONG DEMAND
The Japanese giant will buy some 10,000 lithium-ion batteries a year from Sanyo from 2011 because its battery joint venture with Panasonic is having difficulty keeping up with strong demand, the Nikkei said.
Sanyo — which is being bought by Panasonic — now supplies nickel-metal hydride batteries to Honda Motor and US auto giant Ford. It also plans to supply lithium-ion batteries to Germany’s Volkswagen.
NO COMMENT
A Toyota spokesman declined to comment on the reports, which sent Sanyo shares soaring more than 10 percent to ¥247 (US$2.62), while Toyota shares gained 0.2 percent to ¥4,050, outperforming the wider market.
Toyota, which overtook US rival General Motors last year as the world’s top auto company, has idled plants and slashed thousands of jobs as it tries to recover from its first annual loss.
Earlier this year the company appointed Akio Toyoda as its new president, turning to the grandson of the company’s founder to rescue it from its biggest ever crisis.
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
MASSIVE LOSS: If the next recall votes also fail, it would signal that the administration of President William Lai would continue to face strong resistance within the legislature The results of recall votes yesterday dealt a blow to the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) efforts to overturn the opposition-controlled legislature, as all 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers survived the recall bids. Backed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) DPP, civic groups led the recall drive, seeking to remove 31 out of 39 KMT lawmakers from the 113-seat legislature, in which the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) together hold a majority with 62 seats, while the DPP holds 51 seats. The scale of the recall elections was unprecedented, with another seven KMT lawmakers facing similar votes on Aug. 23. For a
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