Toyota suspends production, again

Toyota Motor Corp has announced another series of production shutdowns, cutting another month’s planned output by tens of thousands of cars over older targets.

As with the last plant suspension announcement made earlier in May, TMC has again pinned the operation suspensions onto the Shanghai lockdown, which has thrown chaos into the global parts chain. 

Toyota doesn’t make export cars in China, but it does freight components that are made there. 

Toyota said its planned June output was 850,000 cars (250,000 units in Japan and 600,000 units “overseas”), down from the approximately 900,000-monthly average insiders signalled earlier this year. 

That’s not quite as bad as the May outcome, with output for the current month (at the time of writing) first cut to 750,000, and then a targeted 700,000 – as reported on May 11.

“Due to parts supply shortages caused by the lockdown in Shanghai, we have decided to suspend operations in May and in June,” the company added. 

As you can read here, Toyota will freeze production at 13 different Japanese plants into June, affecting a multitude of models, above and beyond existing announcements.

Cars affected include many that are already drawing long wait lists in Australia, including the RAV4, and both the LandCruiser 70 and 300 Series. Ditto a handful of Lexus cars, not least the new LX and NX range – both of which have Australian wait lists past 12 months.

To put these latest cuts into context, Toyota now says to expect a group-wide output of 9.7 million cars in this Japanese fiscal year (ending March 31), down from an initial projection of 11 million cars when it thought the global supply chain would bounce back this year. 

Losing around 1.3 million vehicles from global allocation will send shockwaves throughout all key Toyota regions, not least of all Australia where the company commands north of 20 per cent market share.

“We at Toyota would like to again apologise for the repeated adjustments to our production plans due to the parts shortage resulting from the spread of COVID-19, and for causing considerable inconvenience to our customers, suppliers, and other parties concerned,” Toyota’s global HQ said.

“… The shortage of semiconductors, spread of COVID-19 and other factors are making it difficult to look ahead, but we will continue to make every effort possible to deliver as many vehicles to our customers at the earliest date.”

To its credit Toyota Australia has kept industry stakeholders quite well informed of its stock situation compared to other brands, and we’re expecting another localised update in the near future. We will always keep you as informed as we are.

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