Toyota to restart Japan production on Wednesday after system failure

TOKYO - Toyota Motor will restart operations at its assembly plants in Japan on Wednesday, after a production system malfunction brought domestic output to a halt at the world’s biggest-selling automaker.

Toyota will resume operations at 25 production lines of a dozen plants in its home market from Wednesday morning and add the final two plants from the afternoon, it said.

The company continues to investigate the cause of the glitch, which it said was not due to a cyber attack and which prevented it from ordering components.

The plants together account for about a third of the automaker’s global production, Reuters calculations showed.

Toyota’s domestic production

had been on the rebound

after a series of reduced output plans that it had blamed on semiconductor shortages. Output was up 29 per cent in the first half of the year, the first such increase in two years. ​

Its Japan output averaged about 13,500 vehicles daily in the first half of the year, Reuters calculations showed. That excludes vehicles from group automakers Daihatsu and Hino.

Operations were halted for a day in 2022 when a supplier suffered a cyber attack, hampering Toyota’s ability to order parts. Toyota resumed operations using a backup network.

Analysts said Toyota could be tested in making up for output lost during the outage, such as running extra shifts.

“Output was running at full capacity so there’s little additional room for production,” said Tokai Tokyo Research Institute analyst Seiji Sugiura.

Tuesday’s incident had a knock-on effect. Group firm Toyota Industries said it partially suspended operations at two engine plants due to the automaker’s glitch.

Toyota is a pioneer of just-in-time inventory management, which keeps down costs but also means supply chain snarls put production at risk.

While the cause of the latest malfunction was unclear, corporate Japan has been on alert in recent days as some businesses and government offices reported a flood of harassing phone calls.

The government has said the calls were likely from China and related to

Japan’s release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific.

Toyota’s share price closed down 0.21 per cent at 2,431.5 yen, after spending much of the morning deeper in negative territory. REUTERS