Toyota Motor Corp was to resume work at all its Japanese factories today after a one-day shutdown, limiting the fallout from a cyberattack on one of its key suppliers.
The world’s top auto producer was to resume operations at all 14 plants in its home country, Toyota said in a statement yesterday.
It had halted production at the plants due to impacts from a cyberattack against parts supplier Kojima Press Industry Co.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Kojima Press yesterday confirmed that its server was subject to a cyberattack over the weekend.
It subsequently shut down the server and is aiming to restore its system from today, a spokesperson for the company said late on Monday.
A spokeswoman for Toyota yesterday said that it would take a week or two for the company to sort out the Kojima Press hack.
In the meantime, Toyota is using a workaround to get operations back up and running, she said.
Toyota’s Japan production stoppage — although short in length — is a setback in the automaker’s efforts to recover production lost in the past few months to chip shortages and COVID-19-related disruptions. The supply snags last month prompted Toyota to cut its output goal for the fiscal year through this month to 8.5 million vehicles, from a previous target of 9 million.
The one-day domestic production stoppage likely affected about 13,000 vehicles’ worth of production, representing about 5 percent of output for the month of February.
Toyota had planned to produce 950,000 vehicles this month, up from the 843,393 it produced a year earlier.
In that sense, it would be difficult for Toyota to increase production further to make up for units lost due to supplier network disruptions, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tatsuo Yoshida said.
Still, the number of units lost to the recent network disturbances remains “very small” relative to Toyota’s total annual output and the amount it lost last year when the spread of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia caused it to slash production, Yoshida said.
Toyota should be able to recover recent losses next month or in May, he added.
Kojima Press derives most of its sales from the Toyota Group, so there is also likely to be little impact from the cyberattack on other Japanese automakers, including Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co said in a report.
That said, the events illustrate that “strengthening cybersecurity measures for the entirety of supply chains will be an urgent task for the entire auto industry,” the report said.
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