Toyota finishes a hard year with record sales

The auto industry has faced a raft of obstacles worldwide this year, including a volatile world economy and natural disasters of unprecedented scale in two key supply countries – first the Japanese tsunami, then the Thai floods.

Yet, despite taking some of the hardest hits, Toyota has managed a record sales figure for any auto company in Australia. The company’s aggregate sales for 2011 came to 181,624 units. Its 18 per cent of total vehicle sales for the year is well down on the near 25 per cent of 2010, but it’s still 55K more units – about six per cent of total market share – ahead nearest rival Holden.

In the crucial SUV segment, the company’s Kluger, RAV4, Prado, FJ Cruiser and Landcruiser recorded aggregate sales of more than 46K – 17,500 up on any other maker and about 19 per cent of the segment.

Toyota Australia executive vice president David Buttner has no doubt that had it not been for the disruptions particularly in Japan, the company would have done markedly better. “I think we would have topped 200K. I mean, a month or two after the tsunami, we were 60 or 70K units down on what we needed – and that’s just in this comparatively small market.

“As it is, it’s a tribute to the extraordinary resilience of the people of those countries – and to our Japanese parent company – that they managed to contain the supply disruptions to the degree they did, in the face of such immense human tragedy.”

The company’s best seller was the HiLux ute – the third highest selling model in the country after the Mazda3 and Holden’s Commodore. As well as knocking Commodore out of top overall spot, the Mazda beat Toyota’s Corolla to the position of the nation’s top selling small car – a position the Corolla had held for the preceding 11 consecutive years.

Whether Mazda keeps that lead remains to be seen. With small cars the only segment to record positive growth last year, it’s the most hotly contested market area perhaps in this country’s automotive history. And with a new Corolla set for launch towards year’s end with the Toyota marketing behemoth behind it, competitors will have their work cut out.

With VFACTS figures pointing to a strengthening of the trend that’s seeing SUVs replace the traditional big six in Australian buyers’ minds as the family car, Buttner faced questions about the future of the Aurion in a fast diminishing market for conventional large cars. With market share a distant third behind Commodore and Falcon, Aurion was down more than 24 per cent on 2010, with its segment (large cars under $70K) down 21 per cent.

Buttner put this down in part to the model spending the latter half of the year in runout. The company is launching a new Aurion in April, on the heels of the recently launched new Camry.

On the bigger picture, he said Aurion’s place extends beyond the local market. “So it doesn’t revolve around Aurion alone but balancing out Aurion and Camry sales here and overseas. The key for us is to keep our Altona plant working to capacity. We can fulfil that through a combination of domestic sales and export sales. It doesn’t matter as much as you might think which one we’re producing.”

Past that, he put off any further discussion until the end of the year, by which time the new model will be established.

It’s not as if Toyota doesn’t have other new product on hand to defray any such problems anyway. The company is making up for a slow 2011 with a raft of new releases this year. The first half will kick off with an updated Camry Hybrid and Aurion and facelifted Landcruiser and Prius. Much of the marketing effort will go into the 86 coupe, but the more important pointer to the company’s future plans lies in the expansion of the Prius lineup with the launches first of the compact Prius C and then the wagonish V.

Later in the year comes an all-new Corolla, with hopes that it will snatch back its spot as the country’s best selling small car, a position it held for eleven years before being usurped in 2011 by the Mazda3. Asked if the new local lineup might extend to the hybrid version on sale in Europe, Buttner says the company has no such plans at the moment. But it’s not out of the question. “After all, Toyota’s global plan is to offer a hybrid on every platform by the 2020s, and we’ll no doubt reap the benefits of that here. So yes, of course – I can see the time coming when we’ll be offering a hybrid in most of our passenger cars.”

The company has made a remarkable recover from a tumultuous couple of years, with the 2010 recalls that gnawed a chunk out of its reputation for top quality volume product, followed by last year’s disasters in Japan. “Just before Christmas they were announcing production will ramp back up to somewhere around the 8.5 million mark. That means they’re back up to 2010 levels.”

And staunching the fallout from the recalls? “Well out here the problems were limited to 3500 Priuses. But it did us some damage, no doubt about it.” On a number of crucial performance indicators – desirability, retention of purchase, safety and so on –  the company led the global market in December 2009. With the global Prius recalls in Q1 2010, it took a hit on all.

By the end of Q3 last year, Buttner says, every KPI was back to its pre-recall level or above where it had been – despite the hit the company took with last year’s natural disasters. “That speaks volumes, I think, for the genuine faith consumers have in the brand and its resulting resilience.”

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