Toyota

Toyota was found by its president and owner Kiichiro Toyoda which is the best company known today for its cars and ranked number eight in 2011, but challenges never end, ups and downs for sure was part of this great company’s history and is still facing crisis. Toyota started with being a division in Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in 1933, before that time the founder traveled between Europe and the United States to search and investigate automobile productions. It established its operations in North America in 1957 and it currently operates 14 manufacturing plants. The company is still growing reputable and considered one of the best in the world (Toyota News Room 2011).
Toyota produced almost five Million cars annually in the 1990’s and controlled 9.8 percent of the global market for automobiles. Therefore it’s considered Japan’s number one largest car company and the world’s third largest car company in the year 2000.
Japan at that time had limited natural resources, the company worked in every way to produce fuel efficient engines which is well known by its quality now. By starting a research center in 1940, that is when the company started working on battery operated cars, It’s investing $1 Million every hour in research and development worldwide to build better and safer cars (Media.toyota.ca).
Japan went through extremely hard time during and after the World War Two, economy crisis was increasing and the manufacturing of basic materials of automobiles was becoming more and more difficult by time. Toyota went manufacturing vehicles with missing or poorly built parts like wooden seats and single headlights. Trying to work on surviving at that time made the company rely unwanted or used parts from older vehicles to build recycled ones.
For a while after the World War, the Japanese economy crisis increased in which Toyota had to suffer for a long time having number of employees without work places and by time it started to regain health and the market started to rise up again, however, it did not completely recover. With the recovery of the Japanese economy, the Japanese worked even harder and changed their strategies and their plans took another direction completely away from the support of their government. The Americans were focusing their efforts on working on medium size vehicles and larger ones while Japanese at the same time were thinking of manufacturing small sized cars for the reason of preventing confrontation in the global market. The first small Toyota car was born in 1947, for the first time in Japan using a backbone type of car, that was a blast at that time never the less, it was definitely the point of take-off for the Japanese that headed them to bigger success. That is not to say that they did not go through dry time during this success period but they managed to jump over and stay still and firm.
Toyota reached a point when it couldn’t meet the minimum needs of its employees like regular payroll so it started to lay off some of them. The situation worsened and management was dragged down and workers started demonstrating to express their demands, production was decreased within months between %30-35 and the company was falling into great amount of debt until it found itself on the edge of filing bankruptcy when even the Japanese government suspended financing from local bank. However, they did not after long negotiations between labor and management that ended in a decision to reduce %25 of workforce, first group to resign was the chairmen of Toyota and some of his staff (Referenceforbusiness.com, 2011).
After a visit to the United States, Toyota staff of executives had a tour to see Ford manufacturing plants and closely observe the production technology and working strategies. It was a good step forward to enhance methods of resolving financing issues for the company.
In 1950, Toyota was able to overcome obstacles it had suffered from and after the visit to Ford, strategies started to