Toyota Will Increase N.America Production, Says Market Bottoming

Now here's a "green shoot" I can give slightly more credence to.

Toyota Motors will increase production in North America over the next 3 month (6/4/09 Yomiuri News, Japan; the article is in Japanese)

"Toyota announced on June 3 that it will increase North American production by 65,000 units more than originally planned.

"Toyota has cut back its production since last summer, but now believes the market is bottoming out. It will increase output of Camry, Corolla, Siena, RAV4, Tacoma, and Tundra.

"Toyota's year-over-year monthly auto sales in North America has been decreasing by over 30%. Toyota's 7 US factories have reduced hours and introduced work-sharing scheme to cope with the declining sales.

"In Japanese market, Toyota already started to normalize production in May. "

Toyota's layoffs in North America was minimal despite the steep decline in sales. In addition to work-sharing, they also used the idle time to train idle workers on new skills, quality improvement, and maintenance. (Hear that, UAW?)

Now, if Toyota is right, Chrysler and GM driven to bankruptcy start to look like Gordon Brown selling gold at the gold market bottom, don't they?

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