Toyota Expects Profit Next Year

Japanese manufacturer Toyota, currently the world's number one automaker, expects a new loss in North America, despite admitting that sales are going pretty well at this time and it delivers more cars than recently emerged from bankruptcy General Motors. Yoshimi Inaba, recently appointed as Toyota Motor Sales USA chairman and CEO, says the company could even so return to profitability in the next fiscal year.

The reason is quite simple: Inaba thinks the United States car sector already reached the lowest possible level which means it can't get worse than that.

"It's a challenge. I guess I've just set myself a very big goal," he was quoted as saying by just-auto.com. "Our strength is our ability to meet local needs. I don't see how Toyota can be profitable again without being profitable in North America."

"Toyota tried very hard to become number one. It's not that we want to be number one (in the United States), it's because of how things worked out. There is a little pulse in the market. The market can't get any worse. We can still be very excited about this market. We see what many, many of our competitors are doing. They are doing a good job of catching up."

Toyota is also planning to increase the share of the vehicles sold in the United States and produced local from 60 percent at this point, Inaba revealed, which means the Japanese manufacturer could switch production of some models in North America. Although their names is yet to be unveiled, Inaba confirmed they could include the Prius hybrid or any of the models sold under the Scion and Lexus brands.