Top executives at Toyota Motor Corp. Hiroshi Okuda, the architect of Toyota's aggressive expansion outside Japan, and Shoichiro Toyoda, a senior member of Toyota's founding family are concerned the automaker has built too many factories in the United States and sales may not keep pace with the companies increasing capacity, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday on its Web site.

According to the report, new U.S. factories are unlikely anytime soon due to the strategic shift, Toyota scaling back plans for the $1.3 billion Mississippi assembly plant which was originally planned to have an annual production capacity of 200,000 units and open in 2009. Instead the company announced it would have a capacity of 150,000, but open in 2010.

Tomomi Imai, a Toyota spokesman in Tokyo, declined to comment on the report, saying that after announcing a new factory in Mississippi earlier this year, the auto maker had made no decisions on new U.S. plants.

If U.S. demand for Toyota vehicles will continue to grow, the company would likely respond by adding second assembly lines at existing plants rather than building new ones and reducing U.S. labor costs by revamping its pay policies, said the paper.

For Toyota is advantageous to expand manufacturing capacity and export cars from Japan because of the week yen, according to Reuters.



Publication date: 20 June 2007   

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