New cars are seen at the Toyota plant in Cambridge, Ont., March 31, 2014.Mark Blinch/Reuters
Toyota Canada Inc. has appointed its first Canadian president as part of a series of Toyota Motor Corp. executive shuffles that includes the appointment of a new president of the auto maker's manufacturing arm in Canada.
Larry Hutchinson has been promoted from vice-president of sales and marketing at Toyota Canada to take over from Seiji Ichii, who will return to Japan to work for one of Toyota's dealer groups in the Tokyo area.
At Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., which operates assembly plants in Cambridge, Ont., and Woodstock, Ont., Fred Volf, also a Canadian, will take over from Brian Krinock, who will return to Toyota's U.S. operations. Mr. Volf had been vice-president of manufacturing at Toyota's assembly plant in Blue Springs, Miss.
The movement of the Canadian executives at the two Toyota companies comes amid an unusually high number of head office shuffles at auto makers operating in Canada.
They follow the exit of Tim Reuss, president of Mercedes-Benz Canada Inc., who will leave at the end of the 2015 to become head of Mercedes-Benz Portugal, and Lindsay Duffield, who has departed as president of Jaguar Land Rover Canada.
Gareth Joyce has been appointed president of Mercedes-Benz Canada. A replacement for Mr. Duffield has not been announced.
The Canadian units of the world's auto makers – especially Asia- and Europe-based companies – typically rotate people through their CEO positions on a three- to four-year schedule.
This year's shuffles occur amid a record sales year in this country, although Toyota Canada's expected sales of about 207,000 will not match the peak it hit in 2008, when Canadians bought 224,158 Toyota or Lexus vehicles.
The appointment of a Canadian at the top of Toyota Canada is overdue, said industry analyst Dennis DesRosiers, president of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc. The company celebrated its 50th anniversary of selling vehicles in Canada last year.
"It's a necessary and overdue message to employees and to the Canadian market that you now have a Canadian running this company," Mr. DesRosiers said.
He has warned auto makers for decades that it's a mistake to try to run their Canadian sales operations out of U.S. headquarters and to think that the markets in the two countries are the same.
"You can't just take what works in the U.S. and apply it to Canada," he said.
The Canadian market has changed since Mr. Ichii took the helm in 2012. Among those changes is a shift in consumer preference to trucks from passenger cars. Cars represented just 38 per cent of the market last month and have been losing share to crossovers, SUVs and pickups.
Trucks have long been the major source of strength for the Detroit Three auto makers, while their Japanese competitors grabbed much of the passenger car business.
Mr. Hutchinson noted that shift and said one reason Toyota didn't meet the sales goal of 200,000 that Mr. Ichii set for his first year – the company topped that level last year – was a supply shortage in trucks and crossovers.
This year's growth of 3 to 4 per cent is a comfortable pace, Mr. Hutchinson said.
At Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, one of Mr. Volf's key tasks will be to prepare the Cambridge factory for the shift of the Corolla compact car to a Toyota plant in Mexico and its replacement with the RAV4 crossover.
The RAV4 is also assembled in Woodstock, but more assembly capacity is needed because it's one of the hottest-selling vehicles in the Toyota lineup in both the United States and Canada.