Toyota is to buy back as much as 1.89 per cent of its shares for 360 billion yen (USD 3.5 billion), raiding a growing corporate cash chest for the first time in five years, the Japanese carmaker said today.
The world's largest automaker said it will purchase up to 60 million shares over a 10-month period following the next shareholders' meeting in June.
It will cancel half of them to avoid sparking fears of dilution in future share sales, the company said in a statement.
The other shares will be handed over to a trust that will manage them on behalf of a new foundation to "support efforts to address mobility challenges around the world" such as traffic jams and better use of energy, it said.
The last Toyota share buy-back was in February 2009, a company spokeswoman said, adding it had repurchased 930,000 shares for 2.8 billion yen at the time.
