As a skiing fan, Tetsuya once did a part-time job for a hotel near a skiing field when at school, in order to have more skiing time. He also bought his first car, a Toyota Celica, just at that time using a money of 150,000 Japanese yen he earned from the job.
Not only when skiing, Tetsuya also enjoyed the feeling of fastwhen driving his Celica.
After coming to China, he is still a lover of skiing. Once hearing about good ski field, he will drive his favorite Lexus LX to have fun with friends in the world of snow.
Such a person certainly would not feel satisfied with Lexus’s “steady” and “quiet” paces in china. “I am not that satisfied with our current sales, since changes in this market have gone beyond our imgination. It evolves so fast,” said Tetsuya.
According to statistics, Lexus sold 64,000 and 73,000 vehicles in 2012 and 2013 respectively. Tetsuya told Tencent Auto that the brand’s sales target is set at 85,000 units this year. However, after consecutive positive growth for many years, the Japanese brand is now facing great pressure when going upstream. As other luxury car brands flocked into China and kept growing at over 50 percent every year, Lexus had lost those market shares that could have been grabbed by it.
Tetsuya also realized that fact. “During the past years, our sales number kept rising but in terms of market shares, performance declined compared with that of five years ago. Now, it is our No.1 mission to raise up market shares.”
But the first issue for Tetsuya is to find out the proper way to realize it. “The auto industry is much more like a marathon, rather than a short-distance race. For instance, we need to consider questions like what kind of brand Lexus should be in 2025 or 2035. In such a long period, it seems significant if we did not achieve good records this year or last year, but in fact, it is more important if we could truly become a brand praised by customers.”
In the view of Tetsuya, a compulsive lover of speed, you should not run a marathon slowly just because of long distance. “If we could complete a 100m race within 9 seconds, I would try to find out the way of maintaining such a speed as long as possible, say it, ten years. That is Lexus’s future which I am struggling for.”
Market share is the ultimate indicator of a company’s performance. “For Lexus, there is one thing we must do, should do but may need a lot of efforts, namely, to improve our brand image,” said Tetsuya. Nowadays, many people have heard of Lexus, but know little about meanings of the brand and features of its models. So the automaker has made a series of promotion plans this year, especially in terms of improving brand image, and will issue them at this year’s Beijing auto show.”...[
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