April 03, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 14, 1428

YOKOHAMA (Japan) April 2: Japanese car parts maker Yorozu Corp. will aim to boost its group revenue by around 30 per cent over the next five or six years, with dividends rising in tandem with improving profits, its chief executive officer said on Monday.

Yokohama-based Yorozu, among the world's top 10 makers of vehicle suspension parts, has forecast sales of 116.6 billion yen ($990 million) for the business year ended on March 31, up 5.8 per cent from 2005/06.

The revenue estimate already exceeds Yorozu's official target of 110 billion yen for the year to March 2009, but CEO Akihiko Shido said that was thanks to a weaker-than-expected yen, adding the company had much further to go at current exchange rates.

“When we laid out that goal, we were assuming a dollar rate of 105 yen. We can't be proud of having exceeded it,” Shido told Reuters in an interview.

“In future, I'm hoping we will have revenue of 150 billion yen, probably by the time we complete the next medium-term business plan (around 2012 or 2013).”

He said the six per cent target for operating profit margin would be tougher to achieve -- for the nine months to Dec 31 the margin stood at 3.8 per cent -- but stressed the company would not stand down on that goal.

Yorozu, which belonged to the Nissan Motor Co group for more than 50 years until the automaker's drastic restructuring in 2000, has expanded at a healthy pace in the past few years by aggressively boosting business with other carmakers, notably General Motors Corp. and Honda Motor Co.

Nissan now accounts for just over half of Yorozu's revenues, down sharply from more than 90 per cent in 1993. GM is its second-biggest customer with about a fifth of its sales, followed by Honda.

Shido said Yorozu's success was founded on its ability to follow Japanese carmakers into overseas markets where almost all the growth has occurred, and that trend would continue as production needs balloon in markets like China and India.

“We'll need two more production footprints in China, one of those well within five years,” said Shido, who has been at the helm at Yorozu for the past nine years. Yorozu currently makes suspension parts in the south-eastern city of Guangzhou.

He said India was still a question mark, but added an entry timed with the planned start of Nissan's local production there in 2009 was highly likely.—Reuters