Toyota Reduces Vehicle Production in China on Slowing Demand

By Tetsuya Komatsu and Makiko Kitamura

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp., Japan's biggest carmaker, is cutting production in China as sales slow.

The carmaker is reducing daily output in China, Toyota spokesman Hideaki Homma said today by phone, declining to detail the scale of the reduction or name the models affected.

The carmaker will reduce output of passenger cars by about 10 percent at its factory in Guangdong province, the Nikkei newspaper reported earlier today, without saying where it obtained the information. Toyota will slow the pace of production for at least a few months, the newspaper said.

China's passenger car sales fell 6.2 percent in August, the first decline in more than three years.

Sales may fall short of a forecast 10 million this year as slowing economic growth and a slumping stock market undermine consumers' purchasing power, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Toyota has a sales target of 700,000 units in China in 2008, which hasn't been revised, Homma said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tetsuya Komatsu in Tokyo at tekomatsu@bloomberg.net;