Strong local sales haven’t quelled Toyota’s big picture, with the Japanese marque confirming significant losses in the first quarter of its current financial year.
Reuters reports that the marque’s profit in Q1 was down 42% year-on-year, slumping from 997.40 billion yen to 578.66 billion yen.
Toyota described the drop as being “far beyond expectations”.
The drop in profits links to familiar reasons. Toyota continues to battle supply chain issues compounded by ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns impacting factories in China.
Inflation has also played a role in the slump, with Toyota stating that rising material prices have cost it 315 billion yen.
The news follows a series of temporary factory shutdowns and subsequent reductions to the brand’s expected production output.
In the latest series of shutdowns, announced in late July, Toyota confirmed it would be pausing production at nine production lines across six factories.
Alongside this, it announced it would reduce its August production output targets from 850,000 vehicles to 700,000 vehicles. It’s understood that RAV4 waiting times are a minimum of six months for all variants.
