Toyota Motor Corporation

Toyota's origins lie in the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, founded by Sakichi Toyoda in 1926. Sakichi invented an automatic power loom that stopped itself when a thread broke — a simple innovation that dramatically improved textile quality and efficiency. He sold the patent rights to the British company Platt Brothers for £100,000 in 1929 — a sum that his son Kiichiro used to fund research into automobile manufacturing. The loom patent literally paid for the car company.

Kiichiro Toyoda founded Toyota Motor Corporation as a separate entity from the loom business in 1937. The name was changed from Toyoda to Toyota — partly for marketing reasons, partly because Toyota requires fewer brush strokes in Japanese and was considered luckier. Toyota's first passenger car, the Model AA, was produced in 1936. The company was nearly destroyed by postwar occupation policies that briefly banned passenger car production, and by the 1950 Korean War recession that forced Toyota to lay off a third of its workforce.

Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System in the 1950s — a manufacturing philosophy built around the elimination of waste (muda), just-in-time production, and the empowerment of workers to stop the production line when they identified defects. The system was inspired partly by American supermarkets, where shelves were restocked based on actual consumption. The Toyota Production System became the foundation of lean manufacturing and influenced virtually every major manufacturing company in the world.

Toyota launched the Prius in Japan in December 1997 — the world's first mass-produced hybrid electric vehicle. The development programme was accelerated after Toyota's chairman challenged engineers to build a 21st-century car in half the normal development time. The original Prius was not profitable. Toyota priced it below cost to build market share and demonstrate technological leadership. Over 15 million Priuses were eventually sold, establishing Toyota as the leader in low-emissions automotive technology at a time when most of its competitors were betting on pure battery electric vehicles.

Toyota reported revenues of ¥45.1 trillion ($310 billion) for fiscal year 2024 — ended March 2024 — with net profit of ¥4.9 trillion ($31.9 billion), double the previous year, on sales of over 10.3 million vehicles. Hybrid vehicle sales jumped 31% to 3.7 million units, vindicating Toyota's long-held "multi-pathway" strategy that EV adoption would be slower and more varied than its competitors had assumed. Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda had predicted that battery electric vehicles would peak at approximately 30% of the market; by 2025, his forecast was looking less contrarian than it had when he made it. The company that had started making looms and sold a patent to fund its first car was producing more vehicles than any other manufacturer on Earth.