Feb 21st - Toyota Shifts Domestic Talent To Emerging-Market Sales

Stepping up efforts to boost sales in emerging countries, Toyota Motor Corp. has reassigned 10% of its roughly 1,000 domestic sales personnel.

The 100 or so affected staffers join the 200 or so domestic employees already in charge of emerging markets. They will be tasked with developing sales networks as well as drawing up plans for new products and sales promotion.

Those reassigned will work out of Japan for the time being, making trips to local markets as needed. The move will be included in a long-term management policy Toyota is to announce March 9.

Toyota enjoys a nearly 50% market share in Japan but has lagged behind foreign rivals in emerging countries. In Brazil, which overtook Germany to become the world's fourth-largest auto market in 2010, its share amounts to just 3%. And in China, now the world's biggest auto market, it has a share of 7%.

Moving to increase sales, Toyota launched the Etios low-priced sedan in India late last year. This locally manufactured passenger car is priced at the local equivalent of 920,000 yen to 1.28 million yen.

In China and Brazil, the automaker is working toward kicking off production at new plants next year.

And in Indonesia, group firm Daihatsu Motor Co. is to build a new plant in 2013. Toyota plans to procure compact cars priced at 800,000 yen to 900,000 yen from this plant, hoping to tap demand among the Asian middle classes.

The firm is accelerating efforts to increase sales in emerging countries at a time when the Japanese market's growth potential remains poor.

Domestic new-car sales grew 14% on the year to 1.56 million units in 2010, thanks to government subsidies for environmentally friendly vehicles. But this still fell 10% short of the peak hit in 2004.