Toyota said it has an up to four-month stockpile of chips and was not immediately expecting a global chip shortage to hit production, as it jacked up its full-year earnings forecast by a bigger-than-expected 54%.
Unlike other car makers, including its Japanese peers Nissan and Honda, that have had to cut production because of semiconductor shortages, Toyota raised output for the fiscal year ending March.
Toyota is the world's biggest car maker by vehicle sales and its shares closed up 1.7% after hitting their highest level since July 2015.
"For the near term, we do not see any decrease in production volume due to the chip shortage, but we do see risks of a chip shortage," its chief financial officer Kenta Kon said during a briefing.
Kon said Toyota had heard chip shortages globally might continue until the summer, though the situation might resolve itself earlier.
Asked about why the automaker is seeing limited impact compared with competitors, Kon said Toyota has been constantly providing its short-term and long-term production volume plans to suppliers.
The automobile industry has been grappling with a chip shortage since the end of last year, which has in some cases been exacerbated by the former US administration's sanctions on Chinese chip factories.
But the maker of the RAV4 SUV crossover and Prius hybrid said it expects to sell 9.73 million vehicles this year, up 3.3% from a previous forecast of 9.42 million but still down from last year's 10.46 million.
For the fiscal year ending March 31, Toyota said it now expects record operating profit of 2 trillion yen ($19.13 billion).
This is far higher than an earlier projection of 1.3 trillion yen, and well above an average 1.542 trillion yen profit forecast based on estimates from 23 analysts, Refinitiv data showed.
The automaker now expects the yen to trade at 105 yen against the U.S. dollar, versus a previous forecast of 106 yen.
Toyota said operating profit rose to 987.9 billion yen in the three months ended December 31 compared to an average 565.51 billion yen profit from nine analysts surveyed by Refinitiv SmartEstimate.
