Dal blog di Elegant Solutions l’articolo sull’andamento del mercato dell’automobile nell’ultimo anno, con particolare riferimento alla Toyota…
The media is all aflutter over Toyota’s recent announcement that it is revising its U.S. sales outlook downward by 200,000 units to 2.4 million units (a 7% decrease in U.S. sales from 2007), as well as paring back 2008 sales projections in Japan by 4,000 units to 2.2 million units and by 80,000 in
Europe to 1.2 million units. All told, world-wide sales plans for 2008 has been cut by 350,000 units to 9.5 million units.
Stop the world.
C’mon, is this really worth all the hubbub? Geez, the forecast still represents a 1% increase over sales in 2007. Who else can say that?
Here’s my problem: the media frenzy is missing the point. What Toyota is really good at is
matching supply and demand. Take at look at the chart. It’s level. Were you to see the charts of some of its competitors, they’d have some honkin’ gaps.
The even bigger story is about leasing. The U.S. carmakers are in a leasing bind, because residual values are a predominatly big car/truck/SUV lineup is dwindling. Toyota (and others) are so hard hit. Look at the chart of residual values. Toyota isn’t top heavy in big cars…it’s more balanced…and its vehicles have higher resale value.
Guess where people who would normally lease a domestic car are going to turn? Yup. Hey, Toyota, you may want to bump your sales/production figures back up a bit!
