President and CEO of Toyota Motor Corp., Akio Toyoda, told shareholders during the annual meeting that the company is working on grooming candidates for the top position.
What is this all about?
According to Bloomberg News, the world no car manufacturer is taking steps to find and develop a possible successor, according to Toyoda 66, in response to a shareholder’s question at the corporate headquarters on Wednesday. Toyoda said that anyone following his footsteps would have a firm understanding of the philosophy of why Toyota exists and added that his goal would be to rejuvenate the management with this move.
This question-answer session on a topic that was on the mind of many investors and analysts over the past few years as to who would be in line to succeed the current president of the carmaker who has, over the last 13 years, took Toyota to record profits and Japan’s most valuable company.
As per Bloomberg data, Toyoda is the grandson of the company’s founder and has the second-longest tenure as head of a major automobile company. He took over the reign in 2009, shortly after Elon Musk became the CEO of Tesla Inc.
In March, the company took steps to create an Executive Vice President position which fueled speculation about the succession plan. The three men selected for the job – Kenta Kon, the Chief Financial Officer; Masanori Kuwata – Chief Human Resources Officer; and Masahiko Maeda, the Chief Technology Officer- are groomed for the top job.
An operating officer, Koji Kobayashi, who spoke at the shareholder’s meeting, declined to comment on the succession plan and reflected on how Toyoda, as a CEO, had navigated the company through one crisis after another. According to him, other who could have been whelmed in that position, Toyoda instead was energized. No, he wants to install a successor for the future with three young Executive Vice Presidents.
Toyoda, who is 66 years old, is still relatively young compared to the earlier Toyota presidents when they had stepped down. In 2009, when Katsuaki Watanabe relinquished his role, he was 67, and Fujio Cho was 68.
It is clear for any successor that he will have to take enormous responsibility for leading an 84-year-old automobile company during turbulent times in the auto industry, which is facing shifts to autonomous electric cars.
When Toyoda became the President, the company was on the verge of a recall that would impact millions of cars. Toyota had posted a record loss of $2.9 billion (329 billion yen). In the following years since then, Toyota steadily recovered and flourished despite periods of intense disruption, including the earthquake and Tsunami that turned upside down in 2011 to the pandemic.
Since Toyoda took over in 2009, the share price of Toyota has almost tripled, giving the company a market valuation of 34 trillion yen. Despite the recent disruptions, Toyota kept the supply chain steady, beating Volkswagen AG to become the world’s top-selling brand in 2020 and 2021.
