2021 was Toyota’s second best year ever, 10.5 million cars sold, pulls ahead of VW to be World No.1

• Toyota Motor group stays ahead of VW Group as world's biggest car manufacturer
• 2021 total sales of 10,495,548 units (group level), up 10.1 percent from previous year despite semiconductor parts shortage
• Second highest sales record in Toyota's 84-year history

If there is a chronic shortage of semiconductor parts, it didn’t affect Toyota more than a mosquito bite. Toyota continues to pull away from its next nearest rival by volume, the Volkswagen Group, with 9,615,157 units (including Lexus) sold, up 10.6 percent from the previous year.

Including Daihatsu and Hino, the total figure for the Toyota Motor group is 10,495,548 units, up 10.1 percent.

Hybrid models now account for 26 percent of total Toyota and Lexus vehicles sold, 2,482,236 units, up 27 percent. The proportions would've been a lot higher if commercial vehicles like the Toyota Hilux and Toyota Hiace are excluded, but based on the numbers given by Toyota, there's no way to filter them out.

The USA (2,332,262 units) is Toyota’s most important market, contributing 24 percent of its total sales, followed by China (1,944,010 units, 20 percent) and Japan (1,476,136 units, 15 percent).

With the exception of Japan (down 1.9 percent), sales grew in every major market. Latin America was Toyota’s brightest spot, growing 37.5 percent. Brazil, the biggest market in the region, grew 28.6 percent to reach 173,475 units.

Ranking second place in the global sales chart is the Volkswagen Group, which had a very bad year as it was severely impacted by shortage of semiconductor parts.

Total deliveries for the Volkswagen Group, including MAN, Scania, and Navistar, was down 4.5 percent to 8,882,000 units, falling further behind Toyota in the global sales volume ranking.

In China, which is the VW Group’s most important market, sales was down 14.1 percent.

*Others include Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti

Toyota’s highest ever sales record was set in 2019, with 9,714,253 units (Toyota plus Lexus). Including Daihatsu and Hino, the Toyota Motor group’s total was 10,742,212 units.

Although the numbers are certainly something to be proud of, Toyota is actively trying to downplay its achievement.

There’s not a single mention of the achievement in Toyota’s global press materials. The company simply published its numbers with an accompanying Excel file and that was it. It's up to any media who is in the mood to do some number crunching to make their own conclusion.

The only hint to the achievement was when President Akio Toyoda made a passing mention about the company’s 2021 results in his New Year’s message to Toyota employees around the world.

It’s less about humble bragging, because becoming No.1 is not the goal for Toyota. When you are operating at the scale of Toyota, whether you are the world's biggest manufacturer or not is inconsequential.

The way Toyota sees it, when you aim to become No.1, you can only become No.2 next.

Thus, Toyota's goal is to do things today better than yesterday, an endless pursuit of continuous improvement (kaizen). It’s a Japanese way of thinking that Western observers will find it difficult to understand but the results are obvious.

How Toyota manage to skirt around the semiconductor parts shortage that’s affecting nearly every other manufacturer has already been explained in this post.

In short, supply chain disruptions didn’t happen overnight, and although previous incidences were never this severe, it’s certainly not the first time the automotive industry encountered such a challenge.

Toyota is the only company to kaizen from its past experience in dealing with supply chain disruptions – the 2011 tsunami and the great flood in Bangkok, both of which also had a severe impact on the electronics manufacturing industry’s supply chain.

Toyota will continue to face sporadic disruptions to its manufacturing operations in 2022 and there will plant stoppages every now and then, but the effects will be manageable.