Bloomberg (June 30)
“In total, Toyota recalled 3.4 million vehicles worldwide on Wednesday…. Kind of a big deal, but you won’t find a hint of it on the company’s investor relations site, or its global corporate newsroom or SEC filings.” While “Toyota is doing right by its customers” and notifying them of these problems, “it’s letting its shareholders down by making that information so difficult to quantify at a company level.” Toyota isn’t even “the most egregious offender.” That distinction arguably goes to Takata, but Toyota certainly has an opportunity to improve information disclosure.
Tags: Customers, Egregious, Information disclosure, Investor relations, Newsroom, Offender, Recall, SEC filings, Shareholders, Takata, Toyota, Vehicles
Bloomberg (February 5)
Slowdowns at West Coast ports have already disrupted the operations of Honda, Subaru, Toyota and McDonalds. Now it looks like the “union-led work slowdowns could shut the U.S. West Coast’s 29 ports in five to 10 days” unless a new contract deal is accepted. Excepting Toyota, all of the mentioned companies have resorted to the expensive airlifting of some cargo.
Tags: Airlifting, Cargo, Honda, McDonald's, Ports, Slowdowns, Subaru, Toyota, U.S., Union, West Coast
Los Angeles Times (May 1)
California “continues to attract more manufacturers and create more jobs than almost any other. The numbers don’t lie.” Toyota and Occidental Petroleum both announced plans to move their headquarters from California to Texas. Nevertheless, California’s business environment remains vibrant given the state’s unique “ability to incubate new companies and tech innovators, putting its businesses in the vanguard of new industries.”
Tags: Business, California, Environment, Innovators, Jobs, Manufacturers, Occidental Petroleum, Texas, Toyota, Vanguard
New York Times (December 10, 2013)
“Unesco just picked Japanese cuisine as a world cultural heritage, recognition that the Japanese government had lobbied hard for. Toyota, Sony and Nintendo may have once served as symbols of national identity, but they are now eclipsed.”
Tags: Cuisine, Government, Heritage, Japan, Japanese, Lobbied, National identity, Nintendo, Sony, Symbols, Toyota, Unesco
Barrons (January 30)
“Fracking is creating a new source of cheap energy. By 2020, the U.S. is expected to become the world’s largest energy producer. And the falling cost of natural gas (now about a third of Europe’s and less than a quarter of Japan’s) is attracting corporate attention. “After decades of outsourcing… companies like Apple, Caterpillar, Ford Motor, General Electric, and Whirlpool are making more of their goods on American soil again. It isn’t just U.S. companies that are drawn to our cheap energy, weak dollar, and stagnant wages. Samsung Electronics plans a $4 billion semiconductor plant in Texas, Airbus SAS is building a factory in Alabama, and Toyota wants to export minivans made in Indiana to Asia.”
Tags: Airbus, Apple, Caterpillar, Energy, Ford Motor, Fracking, General electric, Samsung, Toyota, U.S., Whirlpool
Washington Post (February 8)
The results of the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration into sudden acceleration found no link to a supposed software flaw in the Toyota Prius. “In short, human error, mechanical errors that Toyota repaired and a dose of politically induced hysteria were to blame.” The hearings by Congress lacked restraint and placed Toyota officials “in an impossible situation, since blaming Toyota customers – though this was true in many cases – would have been a public relations disaster.”
Forbes (July 22)
The media falsely created “the runaway-Toyota scare.” Fact checking is now showing there were very few actual cases of sudden acceleration. And most of these were caused by sliding floor mats or drivers mistakenly hitting the gas pedal. The media alarmed car buyers and Congress, reporting that anywhere from 52 to 93 crashes had been caused by sudden acceleration. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) now believes only 5 deaths were linked to an acceleration defect.
