Why are Toyota's profits soaring

Toyota announced a full year net profit of $9.7 billion, three times as much as last year. CNN's Diana Magnay has more.

日本汽車業巨頭豐田集團發布2013財年（2012年4月1日至2013年3月31日）財報，財年實現銷售額220641億日元，同比增長18.7%；營業利潤13208億日元，同比增長271.4%；凈利潤9621億日元，同比增長239.3%。。上季度營業利潤同比增長111%，是大眾汽車集團的2.2倍。美國市場表現良好以及日元大幅貶值導致出口增加是豐田業績大增的重要原因。

Four year net profit of US$9.7 billion for the world’s largest automaker, that’s 3 times as much as Toyota made for the same period last year. And several factors contributing to that, one of which is of course the weak Yen, which has been a huge boon for all Japanese exporters making their products less expensive overseas and also every dollar earned converts back to more Yen in profits back home. But that contributed just $1.5 billion to those numbers. Other factors which helped with a massive cost cutting exercise, and of course an increase in sales, almost 9 million cars sold for the last fiscal year. The company is citing modest recovery in the US, of course, which is its largest external car market, and improving demand from emerging economies here in Asia. It’s a bit of a difficult 4 years for Toyota, starting really with the 2008 financial crisis, then of course the great Japan earthquake 2 years ago, destructing production lines and a series of product recalls which affected Toyota’s image and its bottom line, so the president had a message really that despite these stellar results, what he was aiming for was sustainable growth beyond immediate business shocks or currency fluctuation, a sustainable growth that would lead to true competiveness, true competitiveness for Toyota going forward.

Diana Magnay, CNN, Tokyo.