Toyota Will Lose Money For The First Time In 70 Years, Unplugs Electric Hand Dryers [Recession Watch]

Last fiscal year, Toyota made $28 billion dollars in profit. This year? Yeah. Not so much.

This year, Toyota is estimating that its auto operations will lose $1.7 billion. The last time the company lost money was 1938, the year it was founded, says the New York Times.

Toyota, which just a few months ago seemed unstoppable after eight years of record profits, said it suffered from plunging vehicle sales not only in North America but also in once-promising markets like India and China, which many had hoped would prove immune to the United States malaise. Toyota’s group includes the automaker Daihatsu and the truck builder Hino.

“The change in the world economy is of a magnitude that comes once every hundred years,” Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, told a news conference in Nagoya, Japan, near the company’s Toyota City headquarters. “We are facing an unprecedented emergency.”

Things are so bad that the company has unplugged the electric hand dryers at some of their offices in order to cut energy costs. They are not f@ing around, clearly. We wonder if GM still has electric hand dryers. Hmm.

SOURCE: MEG MARCO@CONSUMERIST

Tags: bailout, fiscal year, recession, Toyota

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under In The News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.