Last fiscal year, Toyota made $28 billion dollars in profit. This year? Yeah. Not so much.

This year, Toyota is estimating that its auto operations will lose $1.7 billion. The last time the company lost money was 1938, the year it was founded, says the New York Times.

Toyota, which just a few months ago seemed unstoppable after eight years of record profits, said it suffered from plunging vehicle sales not only in North America but also in once-promising markets like India and China, which many had hoped would prove immune to the United States malaise. Toyota’s group includes the automaker Daihatsu and the truck builder Hino.

“The change in the world economy is of a magnitude that comes once every hundred years,” Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, told a news conference in Nagoya, Japan, near the company’s Toyota City headquarters. “We are facing an unprecedented emergency.”

Things are so bad that the company has unplugged the electric hand dryers at some of their offices in order to cut energy costs. They are not f&#@ing around, clearly. We wonder if GM still has electric hand dryers. Hmm.

Toyota Expects Its First Loss in 70 Years [NYT]
(Photo: blue_j )

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