Dies at 97 Shoichiro Toyoda, executive who helped make Toyota a global empire – 02/16/2023 – Market

Shoichiro Toyoda, head of auto giant Toyota, who led the company as it expanded production to North America in the 1980s and helped turn it into a global brand, died Tuesday at the age of 97. .

He died of heart failure, Toyota said in a statement, which did not say where he died.

In a decade at the helm of Toyota, Toyoda marshaled his considerable skills in engineering, management, politics and diplomacy to put the company founded by his father firmly on the path to overtaking General Motors as the world’s largest automaker.

The achievement was all the more remarkable because he took the helm at Toyota in 1982, at the height of US-Japan trade tensions, when Japanese cars became a potent symbol of American fears that a rising Japan would replace the United States as world economic power.

Despite these tensions, Toyoda expanded his company’s production into North America, first forming an alliance with General Motors in 1984, before opening Toyota’s first American factory, in Kentucky, in 1988, bowing to American pressure to produce cars in the United States.

By the end of his tenure, he had expanded production globally, making the company truly international.

Toyoda took a pragmatic approach to relations between the United States and Japan – then the world’s first and second largest economies – arguing that as Japan grew, it needed to work harder to ingratiate itself with its competitors, message he embedded in Toyota’s corporate philosophy.

After stepping down as the company’s chief executive, he became the head of Japan’s most powerful business lobby in 1994, where he helped shape the country’s efforts to combat the economic stagnation that began in the early 1990s.

Shoichiro Toyoda was born on February 27, 1925, in Nagoya, an industrial port city in central Japan, the second of four children born to Kiichiro and Hatako Toyoda. He had a privileged childhood: In a 2014 column for the Nikkei Shimbun newspaper, he said that his middle school classmates teased him when he revealed that he had breakfast with the family “maid”.

His father founded Toyota Motor in 1937, spun off from an automatic loom factory founded by his father, Sakichi. Toyoda’s “d” was changed to “t” in the company name because it looked better when written in Japanese.

During World War II, Toyoda began studying at Nagoya University. He was exempt from the draft because his specialization, engineering, was considered vital to the war effort, he wrote in the Nikkei article. When the war ended, he enrolled in a graduate program at Tohoku University and later received a doctorate from Nagoya University.

In 1950, debt-ridden Toyota split into two: a manufacturing company, run by Kiichiro Toyoda, and another sales company. Faced with a bitter labor dispute, Kiichiro Toyoda was forced to resign, temporarily ending the family’s leadership of the company. He died soon after.

Shoichiro Toyoda joined the company at the age of 27 as director of the inspection department. Early in his career, he played a key role in Toyota’s first foray into the United States, signing the Crown export model in 1957 after taking it on an American tour that included an audacious stop outside Ford’s headquarters in Detroit.

But American motorists rejected the car, complaining that the engine was weak. The failure left Toyoda “determined to develop a high-quality passenger car that would perform well anywhere in the world”, he wrote in the Nikkei in 2014.

Despite the failure, he quickly rose through the ranks at the company, in part because of his engineering and business talents and in part because of his family’s continued influence. In 1982, when the two halves of the company came together, he was at the top.

It was a period of great promise and risk for the company. Japan has overtaken the US as the world’s biggest automaker, and with inflation, unemployment and protectionist sentiment on the rise in the US, Tokyo and Washington have agreed to the first of many rounds of restrictions on imports of Japanese cars.

As Nissan and Honda set up factories in the United States, Toyoda led the company into a deal with General Motors to help it increase its US sales. In an interview with The New York Times, a Toyota executive said the move was like offering “salt to our enemy,” a reference to Japan’s feudal period, when warlords sometimes fed people in enemy territory. Car and Driver magazine ran the headline “Hell Freezes Over” (Hell freezes over). The partnership ended shortly after General Motors declared bankruptcy in 2009.

Even as he competed with American companies, Toyoda pushed for Japanese companies to play a greater role in the communities where they built their factories. In a 1990 speech, he encouraged Japanese industrialists to “contribute on a par with Americans” by becoming active in charitable organizations in the United States. (The Japanese government granted tax breaks to those who did.) As Americans fell in love with Toyota’s ultra-efficient manufacturing practices, he started a management training center to help American companies. And it helped keep trade tensions low through concessions to Washington.

In 1992, when Toyoda stepped down as chairman to become chairman of the company’s board, Toyota had factories in 22 countries and competed with its former partner, General Motors, for the title of the world’s largest automaker, which it won in 2008. .

In 1994, when Japan’s meteoric economic rise suddenly turned into a period of doldrums, Toyoda was appointed head of the Keidanren business lobby group, where he spent four years pressing the country to reduce the many regulations that, in his opinion, impeded his growth.

Toyoda left Toyota’s chairmanship in 1999 and became honorary chairman for life, a position in which he continued to influence the direction of the company. In 2007, he was inducted into the US Automotive Hall of Fame.

Reflecting on his career in the 2014 article, he wrote, “I have worked doggedly to add at least a few lines to the auto industry history textbooks.”

Toyoda is survived by his wife Hiroko, whom he married in 1952, son Akio and daughter Atsuko.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves