Toyota Dreams Big, Wants To Triple Chinese Car Sales By 2030

Toyota now wants to triple its car production in China by the year 2030, as it strives to keep up with its competitors in the world’s largest market.

The Japanese automaker is aiming to build 3.5 million vehicles per year in China, while also boosting imports to half a million vehicles, according to people familiar with this plan. Currently, Toyota is only producing 1.16 million cars in China, selling 1.3 million there for a 4.5% market share, reports Automotive News.

Meanwhile, rivals such as Volkswagen and General Motors sell more than 4 million cars each, which goes to show how much ground there is to be made up by Toyota.

Now that Chinese officials are all for green technologies, Toyota feels as though it can make a bigger push in a country that is now aiming for a fifth of its car sales to be “new-energy vehicles” by 2025.

In order to get there, Toyota will boost its Chinese capacity to 2 million units per year by the early 2020s, moving towards their 3.5 million vehicles per year target by the end of the next decade. Part of their plan is to expand capacity in Tianjin by 120,000 units annually, which will require a 1.76 billion yuan ($258 million) investment, as per a document posted on a local government website.

Additionally, a new factory capable of producing 200,000 vehicles per year will be built in Guangzhou, as part of a joint venture with Guangzhou Automobile Group. Existing facilities will also be expanded, boosting the annual capacity to 1.7 million units by 2021.

Last year, Toyota sold more than 2.4 million vehicles in the U.S., which is almost twice as many as they have in China, which only goes to show that they have lots of room for improvement in the People’s Republic.