[1/2]Employees of Toyota Motor Corp. work on the assembly line of Mirai fuel cell vehicle (FCV) at the company’s Motomachi plant in Toyota, Aichi prefecture, Japan, May 17, 2018. Picture taken May 17, 2018. Portal/Issei Kato/File Photo ACQUIRE LICENSE RIGHTS
TOKYO, Aug 29 (Portal) – Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) halted operations at a dozen assembly plants in Japan on Tuesday over a disruption in its production system, the automaker said, likely leading to the shutdown of almost all domestic plants Output.
The automaker is investigating the cause of the problem, a spokesman said, adding it was “not likely to be due to a cyberattack.” The disruption has resulted in the company being unable to order components, the spokesman added.
While the exact amount of lost production is unclear, all of Toyota’s domestic assembly plants have been suspended except two, the Miyata plant in southern Fukuoka Prefecture and a Kyoto plant owned by Toyota subsidiary Daihatsu, the spokesman said.
According to Portal calculations, the 14 plants in Japan account for around a third of global Toyota production. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker in terms of sales.
Operations ceased from Tuesday morning and it is unclear whether it can resume from the afternoon shift, the spokesman said.
Toyota’s operations ground to a halt last year when one of its suppliers was hit by a cyberattack. This one-day disruption caused a production loss of around 13,000 cars.
The automaker is a pioneer of just-in-time inventory management, which keeps costs down but also means that a mess in the supply chain can jeopardize production.
The outage is the latest blow to the Japanese economy. Some Japanese companies and government agencies have reported a spate of harassing phone calls in recent days, which the government said likely originated in China, after treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant spilled into the Pacific.
Shares of Toyota fell 0.3% to 2,429 yen in early Tokyo trade.
Reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama; additional reporting by Miyoung Kim; Edited by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Christopher Cushing
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