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The story
Toyota Motor’s half-year earnings report for the six months through September, announced on November 5, showed sales up 9.5% year-on-year to ¥26.9624 trillion and operating profit up 9.2% to ¥2.1911 trillion, with strong hybrid vehicle sales driving both higher revenue and profit. On 5ch’s Breaking News+ (Newsplus) thread, while many praised the strong results, discussion spread to questions about how much the weak yen was inflating the numbers, comparisons with the performance gaps among other domestic automakers like Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, and Subaru, and even comparisons with the huge profit surge reported around the same time at Samsung’s semiconductor division in South Korea — opinions were divided over what the strong earnings really mean.
Toyota Motor’s half-year earnings: sales up roughly 10% year-on-year to ¥26.9624 trillion, boosted by strong hybrid vehicle sales
Toyota Motor’s half-year earnings report for September, announced on the 5th, showed sales up 9.5% from the previous year,
at ¥26.9624 trillion, with operating profit up 9.2% to ¥2.1911 trillion.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Feels like something's being sacrificed somewhere to pull that off though.
The weak yen.
Primary industries (farming/fishing) have shifted toward exports and it's brutal — none of it circulates back domestically.
We're even losing out on imported raw materials, buying power and all — can't even get the tails of things like Chilean sea bass (a prized imported fish) anymore.
We've already reached the point of no return.
Toyota? Well, fine, if Toyota alone can keep the country running.
> Feels like something's being sacrificed somewhere
A trade-off against ordinary people's livelihoods.
I'd like to eat something good for once too.
One-trillionth of sales works out to all of ¥27.
Want to spend it on a Tirol-choco (a tiny penny candy)?
Nissan's clawing its way back but still has a long way to go,
Honda and Daihatsu are a wreck,
Suzuki's already on a countdown to the end,
and Subaru's hopeless now even in the US.
What about Mazda and Mitsubishi?
Every automaker reports this week, don't panic, genius.
Eh, they brought it on themselves really —
every one of those companies abandoned the Japanese market and trashed their own brand.
the earnings aren't actually all that good.
That makes no sense.
They're making money precisely because of the weak yen.
Overseas, Mitsubishi vehicles are built to military spec, after all.
That makes no sense.
Companies like Toyota hold assets both in Japan and overseas.
With a weak yen, the yen value of those assets goes up.
How do other overseas automakers look when measured in yen?
Tesla, for instance.
Like, if the yen's value has dropped 70% but the yen-denominated figure only rose 20%, that's a real-terms loss, right?
Samsung's semiconductor division posts a 15x jump in operating profit to ¥12 trillion for July–September, on surging AI demand
Semiconductors
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOGM272ZD0X21C26A0000000/
That's just riding the semiconductor boom — South Korea's small businesses and ordinary citizens are in rough shape.
And half of that Samsung profit gets skimmed off by foreign shareholders anyway.
For an American company or an American person, how much their assets are worth in yen terms means nothing — because living their whole life in America is just the normal case.
Apply that same logic to a Japanese person, though, and the yen value is everything.
The US is resource-rich, so it doesn't need to import.
Japan needs dollars.
You can't buy things with yen alone.
The currency itself doesn't really matter — it's just that to see where you actually stand, don't you need to put everything in the same unit and compare relatively?
I'm honestly not sure how impressive ¥26 trillion is in today's terms. Does this put them back ahead of Volkswagen at No. 1 again?
Toyota is the last fortress of technological-powerhouse Japan, after all.
If Toyota goes under, Japan goes with it.
Huh? What about Nissan Motor and Honda Motor, the pride of my home prefecture, Tochigi?
What actually props up technological-powerhouse Japan is the companies making materials and equipment — Toyota's just riding a weak-yen windfall.
Seriously, what does being a tech powerhouse have to do with Toyota anyway?
Pay attention here — actual vehicle unit sales aren't growing at all.
The reality is this is just inflated by yen conversion thanks to the weak yen.
For Toyota, this is exactly the 'weak-yen windfall' that [PM] Takaichi talks about so happily, but what that really means is that Japan as a whole is barely earning any real 'foreign currency' anymore.
Fundamentally it's no different from a kid who keeps printing more and more of the toy money called the 'yen' while what it can actually buy keeps shrinking, yet still struts around thinking 'I'm rich~' — and the destination of that road is Zimbabwe.
What Japan is earning right now isn't export income but primary income from overseas investment, so the weak yen is irrelevant to that.
On top of that, Japan has the world's largest net external assets, which is exactly why it can hold an unlimited swap line with Uncle Sam.
Isn't Japan, now as always, fundamentally a domestic-demand-driven economy with low export dependence? That's exactly why domestic consumption matters so much. If the weak yen is dragging domestic consumption down, that should be a real blow to Japan.
What do you think happens to that in a real crisis? Where's the guarantee that debtor nations will actually keep paying it back?
What happens to a rich man too arrogant to produce anything he needs himself, who just buys things made by others (other countries) with money, if he gets dropped on a desert island?
You might want to work on thinking about things more fundamentally.
The rich hoarding it all for themselves is the biggest cause of this economic slump.
Just hand out cash payments.
I'd really like Aichi Prefecture residents (Toyota's home turf) to get that.
Just buy the stock.
I hold tens of thousands of shares myself just to collect the dividends, lol.
Is France — where riots are breaking out over high prices — also seeing negative domestic consumption because of the weak yen? 🤭
France? Weren't we talking about Japan here?
Don't France and Italy have riots all the time anyway? France even had riots right after winning back-to-back World Cups, for some reason…
So your argument is basically 'currency weakness is only happening in Japan! Therefore high prices are a Japan-only phenomenon!' right? 🤣
It'd be weird if France's high prices WEREN'T because of the weak yen too, huh 🤭
Also, this is the first I'm hearing that winning back-to-back World Cups has economic significance — whoa, that's rough, real rough 😅
Butting in here, but even as an outsider I have absolutely no idea what you're saying. You seem pretty pleased with yourself though.
Why would Japan's weak yen have anything to do with France's high prices? What kind of economic worldview is that? (´・ω・`)
Does the weak yen even affect France? I don't get why France came up in the first place. How does that connect?
France having riots is pretty much business as usual. The current riots are getting a ton of attention in Japan, but when they raised the pension age, that was more than twice this scale — they did it something like ten times and even torched government buildings.
If the Japanese had a French mindset, I figure the 'lost generation' kids back in the day would've skipped riots entirely and gone straight to staging a revolution. That's how different the national character is.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Toyota’s latest earnings are yen-converted figures, and a weak yen has the effect of inflating the value of overseas sales and profit once translated back into yen. In the thread, users pointed out that Toyota’s own announced global unit sales were down 4% year-on-year at 5.059 million vehicles, making it a point of debate that growth in sales and profit doesn’t necessarily mean growth in units sold. There’s also a sense that a weak yen tends to favor export- and overseas-investment-driven big corporations while working against the direction of primary-sector industries and domestically focused small businesses that rely on imported raw materials — meaning the same “weak yen” gets judged very differently depending on where you stand. The thread also weighed in on other domestic automakers’ results and South Korea’s Samsung semiconductor division, which grew rapidly on AI demand, reflecting a split in whether Toyota’s strong earnings reflect the overall strength of Japanese manufacturing or are a special case unique to Toyota alone.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “[Breaking] Toyota: half-year sales ¥26.9624 trillion (+9.5%), profit ¥2.1911 trillion (+9.2%) — mid-term earnings boosted by strong hybrid vehicle sales, etc.“
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