Masahiro Yamamoto, Chief Officer, Accounting Group
We certainly do not regard these as difficult results. Even with 370,000 colleagues (employees) unable to make cars, we continued to make concerted efforts, discussing the problems faced by the genba and possible improvements.
Each day, we worked to take another step forward, and the result was a first-half operating income of 2,464.2 billion yen.
Though I don’t know if this is the right way to frame it, the past two years are the only times we have achieved results above 2 trillion yen.
I believe this has been underpinned by the efforts of our stakeholders and 370,000 employees.
Instead of management waiting for information to reach us in the boardroom, we went out to the genba and listened to people’s concerns. Only then do we hear the feedback that enables us to make concrete investments in human resources.
This spurred us to tackle problems with swift decisions and actions.
As momentum built, this has required additional investment on top of the initial figure. With efforts underway, we hope that the positive impact of human resources investments will be acknowledged.
These extend beyond merely Toyota to our subsidiaries and overseas suppliers. Please understand the increase as an identification of these needs.
