TOKYO: Toyota said Friday that its quarterly net profit skyrocketed to $3.71 billion and it upped sales targets, as the Japanese auto giant recovered from last year’s quake-tsunami disaster.

The company said it earned 290.3 billion yen in the fiscal first quarter to June, up from just 1.16 billion yen a year ago — the first full quarter after Japan was devastated by the March 11 natural disasters that dented production and demand.

Sales in the period shot up n ...

KARACHI: Locally assembled Chinese bikes failed to find a foothold in Afghanistan, sources said on Friday, mainly due to opening of new plants and a discontinuation of duty drawback facility.

Chinese bikes assembled in Pakistan are seen in Kandahar but have been unable to grab a significant share of Afghanistan’s bike market since there emerged a huge demand for used bikes.

Meanwhile, a leading Japanese bike assembler in Pakistan was able to export a viable volume to ...

TOKYO: Japan's top trading house Mitsubishi Corp. said Thursday that lower commodity prices and labour action at its Australian coking-coal subsidiary weighed on quarterly earnings.

The company said its net profit slipped 15.2 percent to 98.14 billion yen ($1.25 billion) in the three months to June from a year ago while revenue edged

down 0.8 percent to 4.8 trillion yen in the quarter.

Mitsubishi blamed the revenue drop on lower prices and falling output at the coa ...

PARIS: Japanese automaker Toyota said Thursday it was recalling 600,000 vehicles in Europe to check for loose nuts in the rear wheel area, following a similar recall in the United States.

The recall concerns three models -- RAV4 sport utility vehicles, Avensis family and Auris compact cars -- and follows the recall of 780,000 US vehicles for the same problem.

Toyota said in a statement the recall was not due to a "concept or design" error but a problem that aris ...

Car dealers have protested at new car registration procedures and documentation introduced by the Excise and Taxation Department, saying they create more hassles for buyers and sellers.

Rizwan Goraya, press secretary of the Jail Road Traders Association, told The Express Tribune that the association had lodged a protest against the new registration policy with the Excise and Taxation director general.

On July 1, the department introduced new passport-size bo ...

BERLIN: German luxury carmaker BMW said Wednesday its net profits had dropped sharply in the second quarter of the year despite strong sales growth in Asia, especially in China.

Net profits came to 1.28 billion euros ($1.58 billion) in the second three months of the year, BMW said, a decline of 28.1 percent on the same period in 2011.

This disappointed analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, who had forecast a drop of 24 percent to 1.4 billion euros.

Nevertheless ...

MUNICH: German luxury car maker Audi's 11.5 percent profit margin may slide if deteriorating economic conditions in austerity-strapped southern Europe keep adding pressure to prices, the company's finance chief said on Tuesday.

"One cannot extricate oneself completely from the market," Axel Strotbek said at a press briefing in Munich, outlining the car maker's second-quarter results.

The Volkswagen division reaffirmed its aim this year of matching last year's r ...

CHICAGO: US auto sales posted their best July performance since 2007 on Wednesday, but results were mixed as Ford and General Motors stumbled to a loss as rivals Chrysler, Toyota and Honda saw big gains.

While some analysts have expressed concern that the weakening economy and rising gas prices could impact sales, automakers expressed confidence that demand would remain strong.

Total industry sales rose 8.9 percent from July 2011 and came in at an adjusted, annualized ra ...

BERLIN: Audi, the top-of-the-range carmaker owned by German auto giant Volkswagen, said operating profit accelerated powerfully in the first half of the year and stuck to its full-year target.

Operating profit rose 13.2 percent to 2.9 billion euros ($3.6 billion) compared to the same period in 2011, the firm said, registering sales of 25 billion euros, a gain of 16.2 percent.

Audi said it delivered 733,237 cars in the first half of the year, 12.3 percent more than it ha ...

BERLIN: German vehicle maker Daimler has alerted buyers of 7,200 buses to a possible defect in some plug connectors which could cause a fire, a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The problem at the Mercedes-Benz and Setra brands affects bus models Intouro, Integro and Multiclass, of which Daimler sold about 10,000 between 2006 and 2011, spokeswoman Uta Leitner told Reuters by telephone.

She said there was a risk that electric plug connections could corrode, creating th ...