Akio Toyoda, President and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty’s paintings
Toyota engineChairman and chief executive officer Akio Toyoda will step down on April 1 and get replaced by current brand director Koji Sato, the Japanese automaker said on Thursday.
Sato, 53, has headed the Toyota Lexus division and the GAZOO racing company since 2020.
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Toyoda will grow to be the brand new chairman of the board, while current chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada will remain a member of the board.
Toyoda, 66, is the grandson of the founding father of the automobile manufacturer i has been the CEO since June 2009.
“I believed the most effective option to proceed transforming Toyota could be for me to grow to be CEO supporting the brand new CEO, and that led to today’s decision. President Uchiyamada has been supporting me in every possible way for a very long time,” Toyoda said in a translated webcast.
“Looking back, those 13 years were a day-to-day struggle for survival, and that is my honest feeling,” he added.
“Toyota’s current structural change was prompted by my resignation,” Uchiyamada said, stressing that he had considered retiring “for a while” to make way for a latest generation.
“The premise for passing the baton to the subsequent generation has been laid,” he said.
“Cars of the longer term will evolve within the very concept of mobility. Amongst them, I hope to preserve the automobile’s core value and propose latest types of mobility,” said Sato, adding that this represented the mission of the brand new management team.
Tokyo-listed shares of Toyota ended 0.63% lower on Thursday before the announcement.
Pioneering green cars in 1997 with the introduction of the hybrid Prius, the corporate increasingly fended off criticism of the pace at which it pursued fully electric vehicles, catching up with newcomers similar to Tesla.
In December 2021 it announced plans produce 30 models of electrical vehicles by 2030. A yr later, in December 2022, a consortium he leads secured funding to develop a hydrogen fuel cell pickup truck within the UK
Sato on Thursday admitted that Toyota must proceed its green efforts: “Energy security, for instance, is an enormous challenge that the entire planet has to face. And likewise that moving towards carbon neutrality will be one example of what we want to work towards.”
— CNBC’s Jihye Lee contributed to this story
Correction: This text has been updated to reflect that Toyoda was referring to Toyota when discussing its transformation within the webcast. Sato heads the Toyota Lexus division. The sooner version had an error within the division name.