“They sell an awful lot of high-end SUVs,” Mark Yockey, a New York-based managing director at Artisan Partners, said before the company released results. “There’s a waiting line to buy Highlanders in the U.S., and those sell at much higher margins than if you’re just selling Corollas.”
Toyota’s net income also led the industry for the quarter. Its profit was about 30 percent higher than Volkswagen’s 3.19 billion euros ($4.4 billion), and surpassed the combined earnings of General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co.
The full-year sales target for Asia excluding Japan was trimmed to 1.58 million vehicles from 1.63 million, while Europe was nudged up to 860,000 from 850,000. Japan was left unchanged at 2.21 million. The first sales-tax increase in 17 years in Japan in April dented demand for new cars in the company’s home market and Toyota’s April-June domestic sales dropped 10 percent year-on-year to 319,460 vehicles.