TOKYO, Apr 18 – Toyota Motor on Monday resumed operations at all its domestic plants that had been halted since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, with volume still at around 50 percent due to a shortage of parts.
Of the Toyota group\’s 18 assembly plants in Japan, three had already been in operation and the rest resumed production Monday, according to the Japanese auto giant.
"The plants are operating with about 50 percent of production due to the shortage of auto parts," a Toyota spokeswoman said.
The firm plans to continue with the current capacity until June 3, with production halting during the Golden Week holiday between late April and early May.
The plants that resumed operation Monday included the firms\’ sites in quake-hit Miyagi and Iwate prefectures.
A component supply crisis has strangled auto production in Japan and enforced a slowdown overseas in the wake of the March 11 disasters, and analysts say it will last several months amid continued power outages.
Japan\’s biggest ever quake and the tsunami it unleashed shattered supply chains and crippled electricity-generating facilities, including a nuclear power plant at the centre of an ongoing atomic emergency.
Many key component manufacturers are based in the worst-hit regions of Japan, their facilities damaged by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake or inundated by the giant wave that followed.
For automakers the world over, the impact has been acute with companies shuttering plants or slowing production as far afield as Britain, the United States, Turkey, France, Australia, Poland and the Philippines.
