Toyota and Honda drew a record number of Chinese buyers to their brands last year as they recovered from anti-Japanese boycotts that hurt sales in 2012, but failed to narrow the gap with US and European rivals in the world’s biggest car market.
Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker by volume, said yesterday its two joint ventures in China sold a combined 917,500 vehicles in 2013, an increase of 9.2 per cent over the year before. The company had suffered its first sales decline in China in 2012 as consumers shunned Japanese products amid a bitter territorial dispute between the two countries.
Yet in China’s fast-growing market, Toyota’s growth of nearly 10 per cent still left it a loser in relative terms. It was overtaken by Ford as the fifth-largest foreign carmaker after the US group’s sales surged 49 per cent to 935,813 units, also a company record.