Toyota Ahead of G.M. in 2008 Sales

DETROIT — For the first time since the early 1930s, General Motors cannot call itself the world’s largest automaker. Its sales fell behind Toyota in 2008, a year when G.M. celebrated its 100th anniversary and narrowly avoided a bankruptcy filing amid a significant downturn in the economy.

G.M. said on Wednesday that it sold 8.35 million vehicles in 2008, about 620,000 fewer than Toyota’s 8.97 million. G.M.’s sales were down 11 percent from 2007, while Toyota’s declined 4 percent.

G.M. had been the largest carmaker since it overtook Ford in 1931, two years before Toyota began making cars in Japan. Toyota had been closing in on G.M. for years; its sales surged around the world while G.M.’s global expansion was tempered by decades of falling market share in the United States. The two had traded places from one quarter to the next in recent years. G.M. had been widely expected to slip into second place in 2007 but held off Toyota by about 3,000 vehicles.

Both companies struggled in 2008, as global sales for the industry fell by 3.5 million vehicles. Toyota said it expected to report its first operating loss in its history for the year ending March 31.

But demand fell the most in North American and Europe, regions where G.M. is a larger player. As a result, executives from the Detroit company, which has lost money every year since 2004, warned that it could run out of cash without billions in loans from the United States government.

G.M.’s global sales fell 26 percent in the fourth quarter, and the company received a $4 billion loan in December; it is expecting another $5.4 billion installment soon.

“Our goal is to fight for every profitable sale,” Michael C. DiGiovanni, G.M.’s executive director of global market and industry analysis, said Wednesday. “Right now we’re focused on getting past this economic crisis we’re in and becoming a stronger company for the future.”

In 2008, 64 percent of G.M.’s sales occurred outside the United States, up from 59 percent the previous year. It still outsells Toyota in the United States by a wide margin — nearly 800,000 vehicles in 2008, or 33 percent more than Toyota — but Toyota sells more in the rest of the world.

G.M., now describing itself on official statements as merely “one of the world’s largest automakers,” expects a rough road ahead. It recently reduced its United States sales forecast for all automakers in 2009 to 10.5 million, compared with 13.2 million in 2008.

“Our target is to hold market share this year,” Mr. DiGiovanni said, which would translate to a 20 percent decline in sales for the company. But even in such a depressed market, G.M. has expressed confidence that it can remain solvent.

“We want to drive our break-even point down as low as we can get it,” Mr. DiGiovanni said. “We want to use this crisis as an opportunity for us to really get the business right.”