"Toyota's outlook was worse than I'd expected. The company expects a really tough time for the first six months," Naoki Fujiwara, a fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management was quoted as saying by the source. "I expect the bottom for the auto industry is the April-June period, followed by a slow recovery."
The bad news follows the sales report posted by Toyota for 2008, a year which registered the manufacturer's first consolidated loss. As for the first three months of 2009 (part of fiscal year 2008), Toyota lost no less than $6.9 billion, cutting its annual dividend by 30 percent for the first time since 1994.
Katsuaki Watanabe, the Japanese manufacturer's president, visibly affected by the results and the forecasts, apologized in a news conference:
"Of course the external environment doesn't help, but we were lacking in the scope and speed of dealing with various problems and issues, and for that I am sorry."
Much of the company's hopes now rely on the third generation Prius. But the vehicle's future may be dwarfed by the fierce competition the other big looser (financially speaking) of the Q1 battle: Honda and its Insight.
"Compared with Honda, Toyota has a lot of larger models and a lot of excess capacity globally," Koichi Ogawa, chief portfolio manager at Daiwa SB Investments told the source. "By 2010, cost cutting and capacity reduction may be taking effect, so they could break even then."
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