Akio Toyoda, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
Kiyoshi Ota|Bloomberg|Getty Images
Toyota Motor Corporation’s President and Chief Executive Akio Toyoda will step down from his post on April 1, to be changed by existing Chief Branding Officer Koji Sato, the Japanese car manufacturer stated Thursday.
Sato, 53, has actually been heading the Toyota Lexis department and the GAZOO racing business given that 2020.
Toyoda will end up being the brand-new chairman of the board, while the existing Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada will continue as a member of the board.
Toyoda, 66, is the grand son of the carmaker’s creator and has actually worked as president given that June 2009.
“I thought the best way to further Toyota’s transformation would be for me to become chairman in support of a new president, and this has led to today’s decision. Chairman Uchiyamada has long supported me in all imaginable ways,” Toyoda stated in an equated webcast.
“In retrospect, these 13 years have been a period of struggling to survive one day after the next, and that is my honest feeling,” he included.
“The current Toyota structural change has been triggered by my resignation,” Uchiyamada stated, worrying that he had actually been thinking about the timing of his retirement for “some time” to give way for a brand-new generation.
“The foundation for passing the baton to the next generation has been laid,” he stated.
“Cars in the future will evolve in the concept of mobility itself. Amid such, I hope to preserve the essential value of the car and propose new forms of mobility,” Sato stated, including that this represented the objective of the brand-new management group.
Tokyo- noted shares of Toyota ended the session 0.63% lower Thursday ahead of the statement.
A leader of green autos in 1997 with the intro of its hybrid Prius, the business has actually significantly warded off criticism over the speed at which it has actually pursued fully-electric cars, playing catch-up to newbies such as Tesla
InDec 2021, it revealed strategies to produce 30 EV designs by2030 A year later on, inDec 2022, it stated a consortium it leads protected moneying to establish a hydrogen fuel cell pickup in the U.K.
Sato on Thursday acknowledged Toyota need to continue its green efforts: “Energy security, for example, that is a big challenge that the whole planet needs to face. And also that the endeavor towards carbon neutrality will be one example of what we have to work on.”
— CNBC’s Jihye Lee added to this story
— Correction: This post has actually been upgraded to show that Toyoda was describing the business Toyota when discussing its improvement in the webcast.
