Toyota hits it out of park in global sales and production. But there's a googly

Toyota Motor has once again marched strong with an all-time high in production and global sales in fiscal 2022. For the financial year ending March of 2023, Toyota announced it had increased its global output to 9.13 million cars, up by 6.5 per cent. Sales across the globe were up by one per cent to 9.61 million units.

The going has been solid for Toyota with Covid-19-pandemic related factors easing out. Production outside of Japan has seen a special boost with 6.34 million units manufactured in the previous financial year. What has helped is increased focus on ramping up numbers in markets in North America, China and South-East Asia. At home, production was up by a marginal 0.9 per cent to 2.79 million.

Now while all of these paint a cheery picture, Toyota continues to be circumspect and believes the chip shortage issue - although easing off - is likely to remain in play moving forward. And in this is the real googly. Concerns about slowing overall sales of cars in Japan are a worry too. Japan was recently overtaken by India as the world's third-largest vehicle market.

Toyota has also been relatively slow in its transition towards electric mobility options. The makers of Prius - one of the first all-electric cars in the world - has been rather leisurely in its push for more models even as the likes of Tesla, Volkswagen, Ford and Hyundai Motor make key inroads in major markets across the world. The company is now reportedly working on an entirely new platform which is dedicated for electric vehicles.