Toyota’s Five-Quarter Profit Slide Is Expected to Break

Toyota is expected to post its first year-over-year rise in quarterly operating profit in six quarters when its July-to-September results arrive late on November 4, US time.

The median analyst estimate puts operating profit for the quarter at 992 billion yen, up 18% from a year earlier, with revenue up 8% to 13.4 trillion yen. A weaker yen and strong demand for higher-margin hybrids, particularly in North America, are expected to carry the gain, along with the absence of the US tariff costs that weighed on the same quarter last year.

The estimate is the median of nine analysts surveyed by LSEG, according to a Reuters preview carried by Arise News. The same report noted that the gain would come despite a 4% drop in global Toyota and Lexus sales to just over 2.5 million vehicles in the quarter, with sales in China down 22% and deliveries in the Middle East down by about a third. North America went the other way, with sales of electrified vehicles up more than 30% to nearly 430,000, even though overall US vehicle sales grew by less than 1%. Yuya Takahashi, an analyst at Marusan Securities, said rising gasoline prices were pushing buyers toward fuel-efficient hybrids and that the volume of those profitable hybrid sales would be crucial to the result.

Toyota’s own numbers from the first quarter show why North America matters so much. In its first-quarter presentation on August 4, the company reported operating income of 1,063.4 billion yen for April to June, down 102.6 billion yen from a year earlier, but its North American business swung from an operating loss of 63.6 billion yen to a profit of 125.3 billion yen on almost unchanged consolidated sales of 792,000 vehicles. Japan, Toyota’s biggest profit center, fell from 643.4 billion yen to 538.6 billion yen over the same period.

That August report also raised the full-year outlook. Toyota lifted its forecast for the fiscal year ending in March 2027 to 3.4 trillion yen of operating income from 3.0 trillion yen, and to 3.25 trillion yen of net income from 3.0 trillion yen, on revenue of 54 trillion yen. The new forecast assumed 160 yen to the dollar instead of 150, and Toyota said the impact of the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake was still being assessed and was not included. Even the raised figure sits below the 3,766.2 billion yen of operating income Toyota earned in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026.

Investors will also be looking at Toyota’s spending plans. The company estimates that modernizing its factories with more automation and robots could cost about one trillion yen a year from 2028, according to the preview.

Toyota will post the results at 1:55 p.m. Japan time on November 5 and stream a briefing from 2:00 p.m., which is 11:00 p.m. on November 4 in Plano, Texas, according to its newsroom. Executive Vice President Yoichi Miyazaki, Chief Accounting Officer Takanori Azuma and Hiroyuki Ueda, chief officer of the External and Public Affairs Group, will present.

The Toyota Report Take

If the estimate holds, the story of this quarter is that American hybrid buyers are carrying Toyota while China slips away. That is good news for the company and a mixed one for shoppers here, because a business this dependent on hybrid margins has little reason to discount the RAV4, Camry and Tacoma hybrids that people are already lining up for. The numbers worth watching in the release are the North American profit line and whether Toyota raises its full-year forecast again, since a second increase would say the hybrid boom has more room to run than the company admitted in August.