Toyota Motor Corp is targeting a return to profitability in North America as soon as the next fiscal year, the newly appointed head of the automaker's U.S. operations said on Thursday.
Yoshi Inaba, who is president and chief operating officer of Toyota North America, said the automaker had completed the process of reducing vehicle inventory to adjust to sharply lower U.S. demand and was focusing on steps it can take to reverse recent losses.
"There's hope that we could make it next year, which will be very, very challenging," Inaba told reporters when asked how quickly Toyota could return to profitability in North America.
Inaba was referring to Toyota's upcoming fiscal year, which begins in April 2010 and concludes in March 2011.
"I realize I set a very hard goal," he said.
Inaba also said Toyota wanted to increase the share of its vehicles sold in the U.S. market that are manufactured in North America from the current level of nearly 60 percent.
That could happen in part by bringing production of the Prius hybrid or Scion or Lexus models to the United States, he said. Currently Toyota imports all of those vehicles from factories in Japan.
The United States has been Toyota's largest market and until recently its most profitable. Sales for the automaker's three brands, Toyota, Lexus and Scion, were off almost 38 percent in the first half of 2009, a slightly larger decline than the broader market.
Hurt by a global slump in demand that has driven industry-wide U.S. auto sales to the lowest levels since the early 1980s, Toyota is forecasting a second consecutive year of operating losses.
