Posted on: Saturday, October 23, 2004
Toyota hands more control to U.S. division
By John O'Dell
Los Angeles Times
Toyota Motor Corp. has a message for its American operations: It's all yours.
With top management concentrating on expanding in Asia and Europe as part of Toyota's drive to grab 15 percent of the global automotive market by 2010, much of the decision-making at the company's thriving U.S. division is being put in the hands of U.S.-based, non-Japanese executives.
These days, "we don't need so many approvals from Japan," said Jim Press, executive vice president of Torrance, Calif.-based Toyota Motor Sales USA and one of only five non-Japanese members of Toyota's global management group. There is definitely no plan to cut the U.S. operations loose, but "we have more autonomy," he said.
Press, a 34-year Toyota veteran, said the newfound independence in Torrance was a goal Toyota had been working toward since it started selling cars in the United States in 1957.
"As we do more and more here," he said, "it allows Toyota Motor Corporation to use its resources" in new developing markets such as China, India, Russia and Western Europe.
If any of the company's 36,000 North American employees had any doubts about who was in the U.S. driver's seat, they were erased in August when Toyota President Fujio Cho gave a speech at a major auto industry conference in Michigan.
"There used to be a time when we could handle everything from Japan. ... But using only Japanese advisers cannot be done anymore," Cho said. "We are stretched thin."
Toyota ranks fourth in the U.S. auto market, the world's biggest, behind General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler Group. Toyota sold 1.8 million cars and trucks in the United States last year, and built 60 percent of them at plants in the United States and Canada. The company is on track to sell 2 million vehicles in the United States this year and wants to increase annual North American production capacity to 1.7 million vehicles by 2006.
As part of the stepped-up drive for self-reliance, Toyota is spending more than $1.3 billion to expand U.S. production and research and development facilities over the next few years.
"Our fundamental philosophy is to build where we sell," said Gary Convis, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America. Convis, 62, who joined Toyota in 1984, is the only American besides Press in Toyota's global managing officers' group.
The manufacturing expansion will add 4,000 or more jobs to a payroll that already includes 31,000 workers in the United States and 5,000 in Canada and Mexico.
Toyota operates four car and truck assembly plants, and seven engine and parts plants, in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Together, the facilities employ 25,000 workers, about two-thirds of Toyota's total North American employment.
Under the expansion drive, Toyota is spending $800 million on a new truck plant in San Antonio. Scheduled to open in 2006, it will build a redesigned full-size Tundra pickup.
Meanwhile, in Tijuana, Mexico, workers at a $140 million plant are building beds for Toyota's compact Tacoma pickup truck.
The Tijuana plant late this year will take over production of the entire Tacoma truck.
The company also is spending $350 million to increase production facilities at its engine plants in Alabama and West Virginia, plus $149 million to expand a test lab in Kentucky and parts plants in Canada and Tennessee.
