Toyota Motor Corp rose to the highest in nine months in Tokyo trading after a US government report found no link between electronics in the company’s vehicles and sudden acceleration incidents and the carmaker raised its profit outlook.
The stock gained as much as 5 per cent and changed hands for ¥3,660, the highest since April, as of 9.52 am Toyota was the biggest gainer on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average and the MSCI Asia Pacific Index.
While the US findings support Toyota’s position that electronics played no part in its global recalls of more than 8 million autos for flaws linked to unintended acceleration and other defects, the company must still convince consumers its quality has recovered. The recalls triggered a 0.4 per cent US sales drop even as industrywide deliveries grew 11 per cent last year, hundreds of lawsuits and record federal fines.
The findings are the “best Toyota could have hoped for,” said Efraim Levy, an auto analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research in New York, who rates Toyota’s American depositary receipts a “hold”. “The brand may not return to the zenith it once enjoyed, but it will recover.”
Separately, the Toyota City, Japan-based company said yesterday net income may more than double to ¥490 billion ($6 billion) in the year ending March 31, compared with a previous forecast of ¥350 billion. That’s less than a third of the record ¥1.7 trillion it made three years earlier.
The new forecast is higher than the ¥470 billion average of 11 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg in the 28 days before the earnings announcement.
NASA, the United States space agency, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, said yesterday their probe of possible electronics defects found no causes for unintended acceleration other than sticking accelerator pedals and floor mats that jammed the pedals. Those were the causes Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, had identified.
“We feel that Toyota vehicles are safe to drive,” US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said at a press conference in Washington. LaHood, who said in February 2010 Toyota owners should stop driving their recalled cars, said he later advised his daughter to buy a 2011 Toyota Sienna. She did.
“The NHTSA’s announcement was good news, but the market here cares more about Toyota’s profit being more than the consensus,” said Hiroichi Nishi, a Tokyo-based equities manager at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc.
