Featured Toyota Gets F On Their Latest Dividend Safety Grade

Many of seeking Alphas' 'reports' are on companies that they short. Speaking of shorting - Seeking Alpha took it in the shorts as Tesla stock went through the roof a couple years back.
Always a good thing to see what side of the bread a company's butter is on

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Seeking Alpha didn’t take it in the shorts, but a bunch of their contributing authors sure did

That said, I don’t put much faith in anything at SA unless it first appears at a reputable new organization.

On the third hand, Toyota does have a ton of debt. That needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

 

One would fully expect Toyota to have a ton of debt because they are having to play a ½ decade of electric car R&D catch up. That's got to be a pretty penny. Too bad Toyota sold their big chunk of Tesla stock a couple years too early. If they would have bought even more - instead of selling, rather than buying into such a big chunk of Subaru, they could have been selling Tesla-like EVS right now. Hindsight is 20/20
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The 10 Most Valuable Car Companies in the World | Investing | U.S. News (usnews.com)

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"Toyota Motor Corp. (TM)
Toyota Motor is a Japanese automaker that is one of the world's largest car producers. Analyst Aaron Ho says the implementation of the Toyota New Global Architecture, or TNGA, has helped lower the cost of initial assembly plants by 40%. He says Toyota's combination of model diversity, feature innovation and global distribution will help the company maintain growth rates in at least the low-single-digit range. In the longer term, Ho says, electrification initiatives will help drive sales growth. Ho projects 13% revenue growth in fiscal 2023 and 2024. CFRA has a "buy" rating "


Balanced views usually are not exciting or shocking.

 

Does anyone think that TGNA will make for an excelent EV ? or after coming up with this platform - will Toyota have to go back to the drawing board.
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Thought they had already gone back to it.

 

In this article, Tesla is listed at #1.

Behind a registration wall. As I recall, Toyota took the crown here.

This shows Tesla at #1, with Toyota a distant second.

Tesla listed first, then Toyota.

Fair, but what did the ‘balanced views’ above tell you?

 

That is an interesting narrative attempt, forcing a paradigm of success based on assumption and subjective measure.

Reality is quite different. Long before rollout, we were told the e-TNGA approach would be expensive. The point was to minimize business disruption while establishing a foothold in the market. Building reputation does not require high-volume sales. That plan included replacement, a platform optimized for cost & efficiency. There was never a back to the drawing board. The only change is an acceleration of what was intended all along.

As an owner of a bZ4X, it's pretty easy to see Toyota's focus was on the delivery of something with the same type of ownership appeal as Prius. Rather than focus on enthusiast draw, attention was on long-term appeal for the masses. That's why cost, speed an range simply weren't a priority. e-TGNA checks all of the boxes you'd want in a well established market... which clearly the industry is not in yet.

Stir about dividends and rapid competitiveness is what you should expect from the media. It's about growth and being able to retain interest when a market truly does reach a tipping-point. Right now, we are seeing initial hiccups in those regards. Slashing prices, pushing limited choice, and milking subsidies is a dead giveaway of challenges to come... which Toyota has been preparing for.

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

 

Actually toyota's own statements say they benchmarked and not only was it technically inferior and more expensive per car, they underestimated volume for bevs. There have been over a decade of statements to that effect. Wisely toyota went back to the drawing board to build an EV platform. They have tesla, bmw, mercedes, and hyundai to look at for key metrics, who each have dedicated evs. It is a good thing. When you are in a hole, it is the wise course to stop digging. I hope they are very sucessful. Tesla and BYD need more competition.

Or as shareholders and toyota's management have admitted, they blew it and are doing a new platform. How well does the toyota sell against the model Y? They could have been killing it if they learned from the rav 4EV and created a new platform for electric SUVs. In the first quarter the model Y was the best selling vehicle in the world. Toyota with the corrola, hilux, rav4, and camry had the next 4 top selling vehicles.

Tesla has been cutting prices because now they have production capacity. Profitability is still high but fallen a great deal. Sales growth is leading to market cap, and selling more cars at the same profit is better than having the historically high margin. It fuels growth in new vehicle designs.

Toyota has the most corporate debt of any us traded company. That is a bad financial metric, but if they are using debt to turn the ship, then its money well spent. If its to promote hydrogen then its pretty bad move. They should be able to easily service that debt if they turn it around.

Yes, which means toyota is smart to change course. It was pretending it was a 5k and not a marathon. It designed its plug in strategy around low vehicle sales, and expected the market to not gain.

 

That's a talking-point, spin to make people believe it wasn't the plan all along. This is actually much like how Prius started. Toyota started with something familiar, something only modestly different to refine their technology with. From the very beginning, there was never a plan to deliver high-volume. That was to be the next-gen offering, a platform which leveraged what they learned from the first. It is what made Prius a runaway hit.

The fact that so many either forget or suppress that history is extraordinary. They want the narrative of Toyota scrambling to catch up to be the story they tell for years to come. Attempts to label acceleration of those plans that already in place are starting to look a little desperate too, since we are only now seeing mainstream interest. Watching Tesla struggle to compete with BYD is clear evidence of an unsettled market... the first milestone of a marathon... actual competition.

So what legacy automakers do to prepare for the second milestone is just enthusiast hype. Heck, we saw that just yesterday with GM setting up yet another "over promise, under deliver" opportunity. Enthusiasts gobbled it up too. Some never learn about the devil in the detail.

 

No one builds an ev (or any type of car) to be mediocre. Take the rav4 prime as a perfect example. It was done great - but Toyota's insufficient supply chains prevent it from reaching its potential. Instead - the resulting shortfall enabled stealer ships to rip off customers gouging thousands above MSRP - creating nothing but short-term profits for the greedy & bad will to the customers. Not exactly what you call forward thinking.
As for bz4? Ok - it's not as terrible as Toyota's Scion IQ ev that was so terrible it had to be killed off in the cradle. So what did Toyota learn from that mistake? At a minimum they learned they needed to get rid of leadership at the top.
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Words of an enthusiast... just ignore what doesn't fit the narrative.

 

Do you think it was toyota's plan all along to be embarresed by their hydrogen hype? Do you think that they wanted tesla to kick their butt in EVs when they pulled out of the stock and partnership. That was one heck of a plan if they did. Look at the facts. I don't buy your spin.

They are smart to do a redesign of a vehicle that will not sell profitably against a highly profitable high volume vehicle. If they thought it would sell they should have built capacity, they knew they were just doing the minimum before. That is one reason management had to change.

 

So, parsing your word salad leaves me with the impression you're claiming Toyota was targeting consumers who wanted an expensive, slow, and range limited EV.

How's that all working out?

 

Study history. Look at the steps Toyota with Prius. Don't listen to those claiming a quick win is the only path available.

 

$42,000 is expensive?

150 kW is slow?

252 miles is range limited?

Think about what stage the industry is still in and who is currently being targeted. There is no urgency to deliver it all on day-1. We'll see the bulk of mainstream offerings debut in 2025. In the meantime, we'll see software updates and a spread of the tech within.

That is exactly how Toyota advanced their hybrid technology. Why are you forcing a paradigm that this must be different?

 

Well said:

Pretty much matches my 2019 Model 3 when new. It now has 114,854 miles on it and already on the second set of tires and performance wheels. Two weeks ago, a round trip, 835 miles each way, $66 per trip, took me to Florida to inspect and replace my backup car, a 2017 BMW i3-REx for $15,440.

The BMW did the same 835 mi route for $82 in gas and ~1.5 hour segments. Driving solo at night, I appreciated the frequent breaks that kept me an alert driver.

Bob Wilson