Toyota reports a 39 percent jump in profit

Toyota is likely to continue to get a big lift from the growing global interest in fuel-efficiency. Toyota has recently begun selling in the U.S. a hybrid version of the Camry sedan. The Camry has been the best-selling car in America for eight of the last nine years.

Japanese rival Honda Motor Co., which reported a 29.6 percent increase in profit to $1.2 billion for the quarter through June, has also been boosting U.S. market share. Honda makes the Civic and Accord, both reputed as being fuel efficient.

In contrast, U.S. automakers have been struggling.

GM, which is shuttering plants and sending thousands of workers to early retirement, lost $3.4 billion in the latest quarter, while Ford lost $254 million.

Tsuyoshi Mochimaru, auto analyst at Deutsche Securities, said Toyota's earnings for the latest quarter got an extra lift from a deflated profit from a year earlier caused by investment costs that had dragged down results then.

Even then, Toyota's performance is stellar, he said.

"Toyota's results were excellent," said Mochimaru. "Sales growth in the American market worked as a big plus for Toyota."

But Toyota has faced its own troubles, including increasing numbers of recalls partially due to its efforts to cut costs by using the same parts across different models.

Japanese authorities have launched a criminal investigation into three Toyota officials suspected of failing to do anything about a faulty steering part, which may have caused a 2004 head-on accident that injured five people.

Toyota is also facing a sexual harassment lawsuit in the U.S. filed against Hidetaka Otaka, who has since stepped down as the president and chief executive of Toyota's U.S. unit. Otaka says he is innocent.

Toyota appointed Jim Press, an American who headed Toyota's U.S. sales unit, as president of Toyota Motor North America Inc., overseeing sales and engineering divisions as well as 12 manufacturing plants in the U.S. and Canada _ the first non-Japanese to take that position.

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