TOKYO|
Toyota Motor Corp. remained the world’s best-selling automaker with a record 5.47 million vehicles sold for the first six months of 2021, outpacing German archrival Volkswagen AG, the Japanese company’s data showed Thursday.
It is the second year in a row that Toyota has been the world’s top automaker in the first half, underscoring its sharp recovery from the initial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and relative resilience despite a global chip crunch.
The Toyota Motor Corp. group sold 4.16 million cars globally in the January-June period, likely becoming the world’s best-selling carmaker on a first-half basis for the first time in six years, data released by the company showed Thursday.
The figure, including sales of minivehicle-maker Daihatsu Motor Co. and truck producer Hino Motors Ltd., represented a 21.6 percent drop from the same period a year earlier on slowing demand amid the coronavirus pandemic. But it surpassed the 3.89 million units sold by Germany’s Volkswagen AG, which marked a 27.4 percent decline from a year before.
The alliance between Nissan Motor Co., Renault SA of France and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. will release its sales data later in the day but it is expected to fall short of Toyota’s.Toyota alone globally produced 3.31 million units in the first half of 2020, down 28.6 percent from the previous year.
Its global sales in June decreased 16 percent to 706,555 units from a year earlier, improving from a 31.8 percent decline in the previous month, due partly to robust sales in China.