Toyota on Wednesday said its full-year net profit more than tripled to $9.7 billion, with the world’s largest automaker adding that it was on track for another soaring profit in the current fiscal year.
The rosy annual profit underscores the recovery among Japan’s major automakers after the 2011 quake-tsunami disaster devastated sales and production, and highlights strong demand in the key Asian and US markets.
The yen, which has lost about one-fifth of its value on the dollar since November, has also helped, boosting Japanese firms’ competitiveness overseas and jacking up the value of their repatriated foreign income.
The declining yen was among the factors cited by Toyota for its profit jump, after rival domestic automaker Honda said its net profit for the year to March soared 73.6 per cent thanks to robust overseas sales, a weaker yen, and cost cutting.
Toyota today said it booked a net profit of 962.1 billion yen ($9.7 billion) in the fiscal year to March, up from 283.5 billion yen a year earlier, on sales of 22.0 trillion yen, an increase of 18.7 per cent on-year.
The firm, which last year overtook General Motors to regain the title of world’s biggest automaker, also said it expected to earn a net profit of 1.37 trillion yen for the fiscal year ending March 2014.
“We experienced increased sales of our vehicles mainly in North America and Asia,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said, also pointing to “company-wide profit improvement activities”.