Toyota to lower assumed dollar exchange rate to 85 yen for FY 2010+

NAGOYA, Oct. 27 Kyodo -
Toyota Motor Corp. plans to revise downward its assumed dollar exchange rate
from 90 yen to 85 yen in estimating earnings for fiscal 2010 ending March,
company sources said Wednesday.
The largest Japanese automaker intends to disclose the revision in its earnings
report for the first half of fiscal 2010 on Nov. 5 in response to the dollar's
sharp depreciation against the yen since August, they said.
The revision would mean that Toyota is assuming a dollar exchange rate of 80
yen for the second half of the current fiscal year. The dollar fell to around
81 yen from around 86 yen in early August.
Toyota has estimated every 1-yen decline of the dollar lowers its annual group
operating profit by 30 billion yen. The coming revision of 5 yen would lower
the figure by 150 billion yen.
The company intends to reduce the impact by expanding sales in emerging
countries and cutting costs, the sources said.
Meanwhile, Toyota announced Wednesday that it has developed the world's first
technology to extract highly pure nickel from used nickel hydride batteries on
a profitable basis and launched a project in Japan to recycle such batteries
from used hybrid vehicles.
Toyota collects the used batteries from auto dealers and dismantlers, selects
recyclable portions at Toyota Chemical Engineering Co. and processes them into
nickel hydroxide at Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd.
It expects to collect 5,000 used nickel hydride batteries in 2011 and 10,000 in
2013.
The company said it is planning to expand the project to cover North America
and Europe in a few years and apply the recycling system to rare earth metals.
Automobile industry sources said Wednesday that Honda Motor Co. will likely cut
its assumed dollar exchange rate for the October-March period to 80 yen from 85
yen. Japan's second-largest automaker also plans to lower its assumed rate for
the whole of fiscal 2010 to somewhere between 80 yen and 80.50 yen from 87 yen.
==Kyodo