Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s largest automaker, added 1,000 workers to build Tacoma pickups at its San Antonio truck plant and is using the factory’s full capacity for the first time after a rocky start.
The company yesterday marked the start of compact Tacoma production in the plant built to make only larger Tundra pickups when it opened in late 2006. Lower demand for Tundras than Toyota expected and the closing of its former California joint- venture plant this year led it to move Tacoma output to Texas at a cost of $100 million.
“No one forecast the overall collapse of the U.S. market in 2008, and certainly we didn’t anticipate full-size trucks would fall as much as they did,” Jim Lentz, Toyota’s U.S. sales chief, told reporters yesterday at the factory. The company’s current 270,000-unit North American pickup run rate, including 50,000 Tacomas built in Mexico, “looks about right,” he said.
Toyota planned to sell at least 200,000 Tundras a year when it began building the truck in 2006 in both Texas and Indiana. Sales missed that target in the model’s first full year, and U.S. volume shrank in subsequent years as fuel prices rose to a record in 2008 and later as the recession curbed demand.
The addition of Tacoma raised investment in the Texas plant to $1.4 billion, Atsushi Niimi, executive vice president for global manufacturing, said yesterday in an interview in San Antonio. It may take a decade to recoup that investment, compared with seven years for most Toyota plants, he said.
Tough Competition
U.S. sales of full-size pickups, dominated by trucks from Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., may total 1.4 million to 1.5 million this year, Lentz said. Tundra sales through July rose 29 percent to 54,515.
The Toyota City, Japan-based company sold 79,385 Tundras in the U.S. last year, down from 196,555 in 2007, the first full year after it was redesigned to compete with models from Ford and GM. Toyota’s U.S. sales unit is based in Torrance, California.
Toyota’s American depositary receipts, each equal to two ordinary shares, rose 28 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $72.52 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have declined 13.8 percent this year.
