Toyota Motor once again finished last year as the world's largest automaker, ahead of Volkswagen.

The Japanese market leader reported 9.6 million cars sold on Friday, or 10 percent more than in the previous year.

With this, Toyota continued to increase its lead over its German competitor.

Volkswagen had previously announced sales of 8.88 million cars, down 4.5 percent from a year ago.

Patrick Welter

Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.

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For Toyota, it's the second year in a row ahead of Volkswagen.

Previously, the Japanese had led the statistics from 2012 to 2015.

Toyota's figures also include sales by its subsidiaries Daihatsu and Hino.

Toyota's repeated success confirms that the company has coped with the shortage of microchips far better than its competitors over the past year.

Decades ago, Toyota was praised by management consultants and feared by trade unionists as a master of just-in-time production.

Supplier products from the partner companies are delivered directly to the assembly line in a tightly timed production rhythm.

Just a tenth of sales in Europe

After the experience of the devastating tsunami in 2011 in north-eastern Japan, Toyota placed even more value on improving the safety of deliveries through far-sighted agreements with partners and through more warehousing.

In the first few months of the global shortage of microchips, Toyota was able to gain a large production advantage over the competition in this way.

At the same time, the different development of Toyota and Volkswagen reflects the different dependence on the European car market, which experienced another slump in the past year.

Volkswagen sells around a third of its cars in Europe, while Toyota only sells around a tenth.

On the other hand, Toyota benefited more than Volkswagen from the comparatively good development of the American market.

With further Covid waves in the second half of the year, Toyota was not spared from strained and torn supply chains. In the past few weeks, Toyota had announced production cuts several times because of a lack of preliminary products and microchips. The company has now given up its goal of making up for production losses with a final push in the first few months of this year and of ending the fiscal year ending in March with a production of 9 million vehicles.

Toyota is targeting record production of 11 million vehicles for the fiscal year beginning in April.

This was reported by the usually well-informed Japanese business newspaper "Nikkei" this week.

This would exceed the previous record from 2016.

The plan signals Toyota's confidence that the auto market is poised for a rapid recovery.

According to the report, however, the prerequisite for the new production target is that the corona-related delivery problems end and that sufficient semiconductors are available.

Toyota did not comment on the report.