At Toyota's financial results briefing for the year to March 2025, President Koji Sato spoke about the company's progress in strengthening its foundations, and its efforts to change the future of cars. We share his speech in full.
On May 8, Toyota Motor Corporation announced its financial results for the year ending in March 2025.
During this year, Toyota focused on its fundamental carmaking strengths to prevent the recurrence of recent certification issues. At the press conference, President Koji Sato explained that the company was now shifting from “efforts to stop the bleeding” to “sowing seeds for the future.”
He also set out two key themes for the year ahead, aimed at changing the future of cars: enhancing the resolution, or clarity, of our multi-pathway approach and establishing the foundations for Toyota-style software-defined vehicles (SDVs*).
*Cars designed and developed with the premise of updating vehicle features via software.
What will this next financial year hold for Toyota? Here is the full text of President Sato’s speech.
Boosting earning power to deal with change
President Sato
Last fiscal year, we were able to deliver many vehicles to our customers by demonstrating our on-site capabilities, even as certification issues, recalls, and disasters continued to impact production.
I would like to express the company’s sincere gratitude to our Toyota, Lexus, and GR customers, as well as to our suppliers and dealers, who worked hard to adapt to fluctuations.
In facing various challenges over the past year, our entire company has reaffirmed the importance of Toyota’s starting point of carefully making and delivering quality cars.
We will continue to build each car with careful attention to safety and quality to demonstrate gratitude to our customers and all other stakeholders through our actions.
Currently, the environment surrounding the automobile industry, including trade relations, is in extreme flux.
At a time when changes are rapid and the future is unclear, we believe that we must continue to pursue making good cars without wavering from our principles of product-centered management and striving to be the best in town.
We will continue to establish development and production systems tailored to each region so that we can address the needs of our customers from up close and deliver cars on time.
Also, in order to flexibly respond to environmental changes, we want to firmly maintain and enhance our earning power.
Reducing costs in mass vehicle production is an exercise not only in increasing current earning power but also in learning fundamental manufacturing principles and in continuing the evolution of technologies.
Toyota’s competitiveness spawns from workplaces that pursue productivity and in which members think and act independently.
To further strengthen this foundation, this year, we will continue to focus on advancing our initiatives for strengthening our operational base. We will do this by creating environments in which we can demonstrate our on-site capabilities for supporting the production of 10 million cars, and our ability to continue taking on diverse challenges for the future.
Strengthening the foundations that underpin future challenges
President Sato
Our initiatives focused on regaining fundamental carmaking strengths and extra capacity for taking on challenges, which I think were efforts to stop the bleeding, so to speak.
However, these efforts are now shifting to initiatives aimed at sowing seeds for the future.
Preventing recurrence of the certification issues has become an opportunity to accelerate workplace-rooted improvements, leading to initiatives to strengthen our company’s foundation, including its workplace climate.
In the voluntary TPS Jishuken for Certification Work initiative established by Chairman Toyoda, improvement activities for addressing essential issues are making progress by identifying waste and bottlenecks throughout all processes, from planning and development to production.
Centered on the Toyota Production System, we are rethinking in a future-oriented way how we work, aiming to shorten lead times. We intend to expand this action company-wide toward improving productivity.
Our plant members have tackled the medium-term to long-term challenges of a shrinking working population and young people turning away from manufacturing. While stepping up recruitment activities, we have improved workplace environments with efforts including measures to combat heat, creating production lines on which our diverse team members can work comfortably, and also by implementing our “Future Production Plants” project, which looks 50 years into the future.
When it comes to development as well, we are working to improve our carmaking productivity to continue to meet diverse needs.
Our “AREA35” activities, which are meant to accurately grasp customer needs and optimize specifications and component types, have improved development efficiency by the equivalent of three vehicle model redesigns on a trial basis in Japan.
Going forward, we intend to further improve our development and production efficiencies by expanding these activities globally.
We are working on establishing a system that will use digital transformation advances for seamlessly linking vehicle specification information from development to sales, which is currently correlated by people.
Working together with our suppliers and dealers, we intend to strengthen our operational base for the future and improve our earning power.