Big market in June

The new-car market for 2017 is not falling flat on its face after all, says Toyota's executive director for sales and marketing, Tony Cramb.

Speaking with motoring.com.au during last week's launch of the new Camry, Cramb was quite upbeat about the outlook through to the end of the year. And the basis for that is a surge in consumer demand this month.

"I think the market will be quite strong... 125 [thousand] plus, which is good. That's a good market. Our plan for the month is 22,000."

The plan is a prediction, a forecast. In reality, Cramb says, Toyota is already on track to pass that figure by a substantial margin. And the company stands to set a new monthly record if it can exceed 25,600 sales for June.

"As we sit here today, we are pacing in excess of the 25,600. But I don't know if we have the physical capability to deliver that many, because there's a lot of cars – more than we've ever delivered in one month. And even though we're certainly taking the orders at that level, and we appear to have the stock, it comes down to mix: do we have exactly the right car, at the right place, at the right time to deliver to the guest who can actually come into the dealership?

"We're now down to one-by-one. We have sufficient orders to break the record, it's simply a matter of can we process them now?"

Cramb says that RAV4 stands to break its all-time monthly record, HiLux is ahead, Prado is "inexplicably out of control", the LandCruiser 200 Series (pictured) has gone "ballistic" and all of this is indicative of supply catching up with demand... yet demand is still growing. Even now, the LandCruiser 70 has an order bank that "we can't jump over".

"LM [locally-manufactured products] is on track to sell in excess of 3000... that means runout is ahead of schedule."

After a slow start to the year, followed by an indifferent month in April, there were rumblings from within the industry that the market was taking a distinct downturn after two consecutive years of record-breaking growth.

Cramb says that view is pessimistic.

According to the Toyota exec, the company is five per cent up in sales for the year to date and that year-on-year percentage gain will rise again from June. The perception that the market has declined, year on year, is due to Easter falling in April this year, reducing the number of selling days to 17 in that month. May was a stronger selling month because sales that would normally have been processed during April carried over into the following month.

"My suspicion is that if you put April, May and June together, we'll be back on track. So the first quarter was behind, but I think what we'll find is that we will have almost have caught up as a market."

Asked whether he had any thoughts concerning the slow start to the year, Cramb replied: "When we say 'slow start', what we're saying is that we were slightly off an all-time record."

As for Toyota, Cramb says that the company – in its final year of local production – is underperforming.

"We would like to increase sales again, actually," he said.

"We're not particularly satisfied with our market share, and we aspire to higher market share than we currently have.

"But step one is to deal with this transition out of LM [local manufacturing]."