Aug. 11 at 8:13 PM
Hiroshi Okuda, who led Toyota Motor as president and chairman during the automaker’s global expansion in the late 1990s and early 2000s, died Tuesday at age 93, Kyodo News reported. Okuda spent his entire career at Toyota, joining the company after World War II and eventually becoming president in 1995, the first person outside the founding Toyoda family to hold the position in nearly three decades.
Born near Nagoya in 1932, Okuda began in Toyota’s accounting department before managing the company’s operations in Asia and Oceania. He took over as the automaker faced declining profits and domestic market share, shifting its strategy toward international growth while modernizing Toyota’s image in Japan.
Under his leadership, Toyota built a factory in France, expanded U.S. production and closed a Japanese plant for the first time in its history. Okuda also championed development of the Prius hybrid, launched in Japan in 1997, helping establish Toyota as a leader in electrified vehicles
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