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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / The Markets Speak

The Markets Speak

by John Cole|  November 4, 200511:45 am| 20 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics

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This should make some things clear about what the public is clamoring for in these times of uncertain and shaky fuel supplies:

Toyota Motor Corp.’s profit rose 2 percent in the July-September quarter, lifted by growing sales around the world — in sharp contrast with the dismal results at U.S. counterparts General Motors and Ford.

Japan’s No. 1 automaker on Friday reported its group net profit for the fiscal second quarter rose to 303.7 billion yen, or $2.6 billion, from 297.4 billion yen the same period a year ago.

Sales for the quarter rose 9 percent to 4.97 trillion yen, $42 billion, from 4.5 trillion yen.

The results put Toyota on pace to set a record net profit for the full fiscal year through March 2006 for the fourth straight year.

Toyota, the maker of the best-selling Camry compact and Prius gas-and-electric hybrid cars, does not give consolidated forecasts, but it said Friday it expected to sell 8.03 million vehicles for the current fiscal year, up 60,000 vehicles from its August forecast, and above the 7.4 million vehicles sold the previous year.

That annual figure for fiscal 2005 is still fewer than General Motors Corp.’s yearly sales, but if trends continue, Toyota will overtake GM in the next few years, some analysts say. Toyota has already passed up Ford Motor Co. as the world’s second biggest automaker. GM produced 9.1 million vehicles last year.

I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

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Reader Interactions

20Comments

  1. 1.

    Steve S

    November 4, 2005 at 11:50 am

    But but! It’s not GM’s fault that they build crappy cars the public doesn’t want to buy.

    It’s the damn Unions!!!!!!

    WHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

  2. 2.

    John S.

    November 4, 2005 at 11:51 am

    John-

    Have you seen the Civic Hybrid?

    As soon as my lease is up, I’m clamoring for some of that 49/51 mpg action.

  3. 3.

    Tony

    November 4, 2005 at 11:53 am

    I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

    Again. The first time it happened, maybe Japan got lucky. But this time? How much more obvious could this result have been? The timing might’ve been hard to predict (bonus points for those who said “Category 5 Hurricane wipes out New Orleans), but the eventual arrival of this scenario? Not so much.

    Will Detroit never learn?

  4. 4.

    Brian

    November 4, 2005 at 12:01 pm

    Yes, but now we’ll be drilling in ANWR so our gas problems are solved.

  5. 5.

    RonB

    November 4, 2005 at 12:09 pm

    Profit margins are higher on big cars, probably the motive behind all the American road hogs. But the Japanese and SKs saw the writing on the wall and hit the right market at the right time..

  6. 6.

    Mr Furious

    November 4, 2005 at 12:17 pm

    Ten years? They already are. If you mean the Detroit makers will be gone or relegated to the sidelines, THAT is a statement.

    The new Civic (hybrid or no) looks amazing—here do I sign? I just hate that electronic dash…

  7. 7.

    Blue Neposnet

    November 4, 2005 at 12:19 pm

    I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

    It seems far fetched today, but I think Toyota or Honda might own one of the remaining US auto makers in ten years. Maybe then we will see more cars with good fuel economy coming out of Detroit.

  8. 8.

    Trevor

    November 4, 2005 at 12:20 pm

    I don’t disagree John, but the bad results at GM and Ford also have a lot to do with the end of their employee pricing deals. All summer long, they were making that offer, and sucking up demand until they could no longer sustain it. Now that they’ve pulled the plug, most people who could/would buy a Ford/GM have already done so. While their sales in the summer were good, now they’re completely in the tank. Of course, leadership in Detroit is doubly stupid. Short-term sales gains and profit margins favored over long term growth and innovation. With their bond ratings now in the toilet, they’re going to have a harder time financing any large development projects.

  9. 9.

    jg

    November 4, 2005 at 12:33 pm

    I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

    Won’t happen. GM or Ford will start making cars that don’t suck quite so much and people will fall over themselves to ‘BUY AMERICAN’. They won’t be as good as they can be but it won’t matter. There are people, lots of them, that will not buy foreign cars period.

  10. 10.

    Shygetz

    November 4, 2005 at 1:06 pm

    I like to buy American when I can, but the difference in quality-per-dollar is so large now! Maybe if we ever get our infrastructure off of gasoline, Detroit can use American-held tech patents to get a leg-up on Japan in the new economy, but for now there seems to be no contest.

  11. 11.

    Edmund Dantes

    November 4, 2005 at 1:11 pm

    Hmmm… seems like a case of history repeating itself. Doesn’t it? Late 60’s Early 70’s, muscle cars, huge boats of cars, bad gas mileage, etc all being churned out of Detroit. Americans buying them up like there’s no tomorrow. Unfortunately the piper came calling with the oil crisis. Suddenly Americans found those Japanese imports to be a lot more palatable. A lot more people got gas mileage conscious. A mentality that lasted for awhile until the affects of all those people buying better fuel efficiency trickled into the gas demand pricing and prices began to fall. Lot’s of cheap gas in the early 90’s.

    Detroit again starting putting out similar type cars (except this time instead of muscle cars and boats it was SUVs). The cycle begins again.

    If you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t paying attention.

  12. 12.

    Boombo

    November 4, 2005 at 1:29 pm

    In not too long they’ll be forced to resort to commercial stating “If you don’t buy Ford, the terrorists win. Are you a terrorist?” How else can they keep up?

    I mean, I bought a Chevy, but it was built in Korea.

  13. 13.

    les

    November 4, 2005 at 1:49 pm

    John, why do you hate America?

  14. 14.

    Sherard

    November 4, 2005 at 2:41 pm

    Please. In ten years??? For anyone that actually cares about driving a vehicle made with some kind of quality standard, they already HAVE left Detroit in the dust. I’ve owned 2 US made vehicles in the last 18 years. Both were lousy. Every other vehicle I’ve owned (Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Subaru) were all vastly superior.

  15. 15.

    Sherard

    November 4, 2005 at 2:44 pm

    Won’t happen. GM or Ford will start making cars that don’t suck quite so much and people will fall over themselves to ‘BUY AMERICAN’. They won’t be as good as they can be but it won’t matter. There are people, lots of them, that will not buy foreign cars period.

    Yeah, and most of those people are, frankly, idiots. Especially given that more foreign cars are manufactured primarily in the US than those sold by Ford and GM.

  16. 16.

    SeesThroughIt

    November 4, 2005 at 3:24 pm

    I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

    Yeah, you’re probably right. Not that I wish that upon Detroit, but they’re pretty much making their own bed up there, and sooner or later (proably sooner), they’re gonna have to lie in it.

    But hey, maybe they can finally make the Canyonero before they go belly-up:

    Can you name the truck with four-wheel drive,
    Smells like a steak and seats thirty-five!

    Canyonero…
    Canyonerooo!

    Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down,
    it’s the country-fried truck endorsed by a clown!

    Canyonero…
    Canyonerooo!
    (Krusty)Hey hey!

    (announcer:) The federal highway commision has ruled the Canyonero
    unsafe for highway or city driving.

    Canyonerooo!

    Twelve yards long, two lanes wide,
    sixty-five tons of American pride!

    Canyonero…
    Canyonerooo!

    Top o’ the line in utility sports,
    unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!

    Canyonero…
    Canyonerooo!

    She blinds everybody with her super-high beams,
    she’s a squirrel-squashin’, deer-smackin’, drivin’ machine!

    Canyonero…
    Canyonerooo!
    Yah!

    Yah, Canyonero!
    Yah!

    Whoa, Canyonero!
    Whoa!

  17. 17.

    Steve S

    November 4, 2005 at 5:03 pm

    They already did deliver the Canyonero…

    http://www.internationaldelivers.com/site_layout/xtfamily/cxt.asp

    Look, the website even says delivers. :-)

  18. 18.

    rachel

    November 5, 2005 at 12:41 am

    I would not be surprised, if in ten years, Toyota, Honda, and other manufacturers who provide quality automobiles with good fuel economy leave Detroit in the dust.

    And they’ll be building them in Canada.

    Toyota to build 100,000 vehicles per year in Woodstock, Ont., starting 2008
    12:27 AM EST Nov 05
    STEVE ERWIN

    WOODSTOCK, Ont. (CP) – Ontario workers are well-trained.

    That simple explanation was cited as a main reason why Toyota turned its back on hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies offered from several American states in favour of building a second Ontario plant.

    Industry experts say Ontarians are easier and cheaper to train – helping make it more cost-efficient to train workers when the new Woodstock plant opens in 2008, 40 kilometres away from its skilled workforce in Cambridge.

    “The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States,” said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant…

    The president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada also said that Nissan and Honda have had too much trouble training unskilled and sometimes even illiterate workers in Mississippi and Alabama, and Canada’s national healthcare system made Canadian workers $4 to $5 cheaper to employ.

    But low taxes are good for business, right?

  19. 19.

    scs

    November 5, 2005 at 4:38 am

    I kind of wonder if the problem with Detroit cars is that they are designed in Detroit. I’ve never been to Detroit and maybe Detroit is a very nice place, but it’s certainly not the mecca for new designers. You don’t have many designers graduating from some top design school and say “Ooh, I’m moving to Detroit as soon as I can!” No they are more likey to be in New York and San Francisco. Maybe that’s why American cars look more like some Nascar wanna be designed them and they are often advertised as muscle cars in ads. When will they learn, the muscle car market is just not as big as they think? We like brain, not just brawn.

  20. 20.

    Sal

    November 5, 2005 at 8:54 am

    I agree the Japanese auto makers make better cars, and have for a while. Don’t know about South Korean cars, but those are cheap. A dealer near here offers a buy one, get one free offer on KIAs, which may sound nice but makes me a bit leery of their quality.
    Note the advantage of government subsidized health care. Another factor is that most of the executive layer at most foreign companies isn’t paid nearly as much.
    Here in Michigan, Delphi filed bankruptcy and plans on dramatically slashing wages & benefits for the workers it doesn’t lay off at plants it doesn’t close, both of whom (which?)will be many.
    At the same time, they’re giving a bunch of their top executives big bonuses. The rationale is that they need to do that to “retain needed talent”.
    If these folks are so good, why is the company filing bankruptcy? These are the people who made the decisions that necessitated bankruptcy. Maybe labor costs got high, but they haven’t increased nearly as much as executive compensation. Yes, those costs may be a bigger piece of the pie as a whole, but you can’t talk about “greedy” unions driving up costs while ignoring the rise in executive compensation at a far greater rate.

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