Matsushima said he was assuming a 15 percent drop in Japanese automakers' global auto output in the business year that started this month. In a worst-case scenario, the sector's combined operating losses in the first half would be the "biggest ever, surpassing even those posted at the time of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy," he said.
A dearth of supply from Renesas Electronics Corp , the world's top maker of microcontroller chips, is one of the main causes of the disruption, including to automakers outside Japan. Renesas has a 40 percent share of the global market for automotive microcontroller chips. Citigroup now expects Toyota to lose 588 billion yen ($6.9 billion) in the April-September first half and break even at the operating level for the full year to March 31, *2012*. Given the broad-based supply bottleneck -- from parts makers within the 20 km exclusion zone of Tokyo Electric Power's (TEPCO) nuclear power plant to factories damaged by the tsunami -- Matsushima said he was assuming the supply chain would not be restored until autumn. Automakers could also face power shortages, especially when consumption peaks during the summer, in the operating areas of the affected plants of TEPCO and Tohoku Electric Power . On Friday, Toyota and Nissan announced plans to resume production at all domestic factories by April 18, but said output levels will be at half their original plans and at the mercy of parts availability. Honda restarted assembly at all of its Japanese factories on Monday, also at half the planned volumes.
