Akio Toyoda, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Toyota Motor‘s president and chief executive, Akio Toyoda, will step down from his post on April 1, to be succeeded by current Chief Branding Officer Koji Sato, the Japanese automaker said Thursday.
Sato, 53, has been heading the Toyota Lexus division and the GAZOO racing company since 2020.
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Toyoda will develop into the brand new chairman of the board, while the present Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada will proceed as a member of the board.
Toyoda, 66, is the grandson of the carmaker’s founder and has served as chief executive since June 2009.
“I assumed one of the best technique to further Toyota’s transformation can be for me to develop into chairman in support of a latest president, and this has led to today’s decision. Chairman Uchiyamada has long supported me in all possible ways,” Toyoda said in a translated webcast.
“Looking back, these 13 years have been a period of struggling to survive at some point after the subsequent, and that’s my honest feeling,” he added.
“The present Toyota structural change has been triggered by my resignation,” Uchiyamada said, stressing that he had been considering the timing of his retirement for “a while” to make way for a latest generation.
“The muse for passing the baton to the subsequent generation has been laid,” he said.
“Cars in the long run will evolve within the concept of mobility itself. Amid such, I hope to preserve the essential value of the automotive and propose latest types of mobility,” Sato said, adding that this represented the mission of the brand new leadership team.
Tokyo-listed shares of Toyota ended the session 0.63% lower Thursday ahead of the announcement.
A pioneer of green automobiles in 1997 with the introduction of its hybrid Prius, the corporate has increasingly fended off criticism over the pace at which it has pursued fully-electric vehicles, playing catch-up to newcomers equivalent to Tesla.
In Dec. 2021, it announced plans to supply 30 EV models by 2030. A yr later, in Dec. 2022, it said a consortium it leads secured funding to develop a hydrogen fuel cell pickup truck within the U.K.
Sato on Thursday acknowledged Toyota must proceed its green efforts: “Energy security, for instance, that may be a big challenge that the entire planet must face. And likewise that the endeavor towards carbon neutrality will probably be one example of what we have now to work on.”
— CNBC’s Jihye Lee contributed to this story
Correction: This text has been updated to reflect that Toyoda was referring to the corporate Toyota when discussing its transformation within the webcast. Sato has been heading the Toyota Lexus division. An earlier version misspelled the name of the division.
