Japanese car makers Toyota and Nissan said today they will restart all domestic assembly plants from mid-April after production was halted following the nation's biggest recorded earthquake.
Japan's leading car makers were forced to suspend production due the impact of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami on production, with crucial supply chains broken and power cuts prompting plants to be shuttered.
Toyota will start operating its assembly plants from the morning shift of April 18 until April 27, a company spokesman said. Plants will then become idle for the Golden Week holiday season, as they do every year, until May 10, a spokeswoman said, adding that no decision had been made for the post-Golden Week schedule.
Rival Nissan said it would also resume production around the same time, beginning with the first plant on April 11, but both giants warned they would be running at 50% of usual output levels for the time being.
The restart plan comes as a particular boost to Toyota as earlier this week it was threatened with a downgrade of its long-term credit rating by Moody's.
Moody's said it placed Toyota's Aa2 rating - the third highest on a scale of 19 - on review for a possible downgrade, one month after Standard & Poor's cut its rating on the car maker.
Moody's cited the impact of the earthquake and the devastating tsunami it unleashed, which led to power shortages and supply chain disruptions that forced the closure of Toyota's plants in Japan.
The agency warned that Toyota's production would not return to normal for 'months' and cited the car maker's dependence on a Japanese market expected to be hit by weak consumer sentiment following the disasters.
