Toyota Motor Corp. reopened a joint-venture plant in Changchun, which had been closed since mid-March, as the Chinese city's lockdown actions were eased, according to Kyodo News on Sunday.
China's auto sales fell 11.7% year on year in March, as the country imposed strict lockdowns to stem the spread of the extremely contagious Omicron variant.
According to the report, which cites an unnamed source, the Japanese automaker plans to resume normal operations on Wednesday.
Aside from the parts shortage, Toyota was forced to cut production in Japan in March due to a cyberattack on one of its domestic suppliers and a powerful earthquake that rocked the country's northeastern region, having caused some assembly lines to halt.
Separately, on Wednesday, seven other huge Japanese automakers, such as Honda Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., released output data. The eight companies' total domestic production fell for the third year in a row.
With only Mitsubishi able to produce more vehicles than the previous year, the eight automakers manufactured 7,093,641 vehicles in fiscal 2021, a 6.8% decrease due to supply disruptions caused by coronavirus lockdowns overseas.
Honda saw a 7.7% drop in output to 634,468 vehicles, according to a company official, with the output being the lowest in at least 20 years. Nissan Motor Co. experienced the greatest drop, with a 13.8% drop to 445,836 vehicles.
The eight automakers' global production fell 0.6 % to 23,216,774 vehicles, while sales fell 0.5% to 24,309,462 units.
Even as COVID-19 cases rise and draconian lockdowns continue, China is taking steps to revitalize its crippled auto industry, particularly in Shanghai.
The massive financial city has been confining residents to their apartments for the second month in a row, with such tighter measures that the situation has become something of a national scandal.
Warnings about the economic damage caused by the lockdowns have prompted authorities to allow some automakers to resume varying degrees of production, assuming they require workers to live in factory-based dormitories-what China refers to as a "closed-loop" production strategy.
Dozens of other cities are still in different states of lockdown, and the impacts on April production across the country are still being tallied.
The China Passenger Car Association reported on Wednesday that wholesale vehicle sales in the first two weeks of the month were down 44% last year and 48% from March. The group also predicted that the impact would last into May, resulting in a 20% to 40% decrease in the output the following month.
