Toyota tops global ladder

Toyota has been crowned the world’s largest car company after selling 10.15 million in 2015. The Japanese marque’s performance puts it ahead of nearest rival, the Volkswagen Group, which sold 9.93m units. The German company had overtaken Toyota at the half-year stage before the emissions scandal broke. American giant General Motors (GM) rounded out the top three with 9.8m registrations. However, Toyota – which also owns the Lexus and Hino marques, as well as a 51 per cent stake in Daihatsu – says sales were down on 2014’s total by 0.8 per cent from the previous year’s total of 10.23m units as a weaker Japanese economy hit demand in its home market. The slowdown was expected by management and was in line with forecasts made last year as company bosses predicted slower growth in Japan would put a brake on sales. GM lost the top spot as the world’s biggest car maker to Toyota in 2008, but regained in 2011 – the year the devastating tsunami and earthquake hit the Japanese group’s production. Toyota accelerated into the lead in 2012 and has held pole position ever since. The Nissan-Renault partnership is the fourth largest car company in the world with combined sales of 8.22m, followed by South Korea’s Hyundai with 8.01m. Toyota’s dominance in the sector comes as Japanese media report the company is mulling a tie-up with Suzuki. Linking up with the small-car specialist, which has a strong presence in India, may help drive sales in emerging markets where demand for more compact vehicles is strong. Analysts speculate that such an arrangement may be modelled on Nissan and Renault’s partnership in which the companies share technology. However, Toyota and Suzuki have denied they are considering such an arrangement. Management at Toyota have flagged up the possibility of buying out Daihatsu’s other owners to take control of the company in a deal worth 309 billion yen or about NZ$4b. Toyota has been a leader in new technology in the automotive industry by introducing the first mainstream hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars – the Prius and Mirai respectively. But with ownership models changing with the global boom in car sharing, the company is also aiming to safeguard its place as a giant in the industry. In November, the company stumped up around $1.5bn on robots and artificial intelligence by investing in research centres in the US that will study these fast-moving areas of technology. Struggling to move past the pollution-cheating scandal, VW earlier reported it logged sales of 9.93m vehicles worldwide last year. In the first half of the year, the German giant was in pole position, outpacing Toyota as it rode momentum in emerging economies. But then it posted its first drop in annual sales for more than a decade as it was hammered by the emissions scandal. The company is also overhauling its production methods, vowing to slash development costs to try offset any downturn in the market and squeeze more productivity out of existing plants. VW’s new chief executive officer says his company is abandoning its ambition to become the world’s marque. “For me, this obsession with unit sales and the ambition to constantly reach new records makes no sense,” Matthias Mueller told German media in December. “I’m not going declare sheer size as an end in itself.” His predecessor, Martin Winterkorn, was fixed on VW overtaking Toyota as the world’s biggest carmaker by 2018.