The world's largest carmaker by vehicle sales. Toyota entered the American market in the 1950s and sells about a quarter of its cars there; only around half of the vehicles it sells in America are made in the country. Toyota suffers from a home-production bias: it sold around a seventh of its cars in Japan in 2024 but made around a third of them there. It has a factory in Indiana. The company is Japan's most valuable.
Donald Trump's 15% tariff on Japanese vehicles cost Toyota ¥450bn ($3bn) in the three months to June 2025. For the full fiscal year the company expects the impact to be close to $10bn—the biggest tariff hit reported by any carmaker. Rather than pass the cost to consumers and risk losing market share, Toyota has relied on obsessive optimisation: cost-cutting, marketing of more profitable vehicles, and earning more from add-on services such as car parts and vehicle financing. In the second quarter of 2025 these efforts produced a ¥305bn boost to operating profit, offsetting around two-thirds of the tariff burden.
Toyota is the global leader in conventional hybrids, with a 40% market share. Its chairman, Toyoda Akio, has expressed doubt about the potential scale of demand for EVs, but the company has launched several EVs exclusively for China, developed with local firms including BYD and Huawei. Alone among Japanese carmakers (and most Western ones), Toyota has managed to maintain a stable market share in China, where it accounts for 6% of sales (BYD, the market leader, holds 13%). An expanded global EV line-up is expected by 2027. Toyota owns 21% of Subaru and 5% each of Mazda and Suzuki (which mostly sells in India).
Toyota will make electric versions of its upmarket Lexus brand at a new factory near Shanghai starting in 2027, working with Huawei and Tencent—two Chinese tech giants that develop software for cars—as well as Momenta and Xiaomi.
When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.