March 18, 2004 Production of automatic transmission oil pump reaches 9 million New production line to supply Mazda starts operation Toyo Advanced Technologies Co., Ltd., which is based in Hiroshima City announced that it marked a significant production milestone on March 13th as the 9,000,000th oil pump of an automatic transmission for automobile. It took 19 years and 1 month for Toyo to accomplish the feat. 9,000,000th pump is FN type, which is mounted on the major AT (automatic transmission) on a Mazda. A ceremony to commemorate the production of 9,000,000th pump was held today. Mr. Kenichi Yamamoto, president of Toyo, directors and workers in automobile parts division attended the ceremony. It was February 1985 that Toyo started to manufacture oil pumps. It first developed a vane type oil pump of AT for a Mazda by using hydraulic technologies and production engineering it cultivated. In 1989 Toyo developed a new gear type oil pump in order to reduce cost and improve fuel consumption, and started to manufacture. In August 2002, Toyo, furthermore, started to supply oil pumps to JATCO which specializes in a car transmission, and extended its business in automobile parts industry. Toyo supplies JATCO with two types of oil pump for CVT which are mounted on compact FF cars and large FF cars. Currently Toyo produces more than 500,000 pumps annually. And the products are regarded highly in terms of efficiency, reliability and cost. In line with the achievement of 9 million units, another production line for FN oil pumps to supply Mazda has been completed, and started full production. FN oil pumps were mass- produced in April 1998. And over 1,700,000 units have been manufactured so far. Since this type of oil pump is mounted on Atenza, Axela and Demio, the number of units produced has increased significantly. That is the reason they have built another line to catch up the market demand. Production capacity (two 8-hour shifts per day) of FN oil pump will be increased from 18,000 units per month to 38,000. Toyo now has 3 production lines for Mazda and 2 lines for JATCO, 5 in total, which is one of the biggest production facilities in Japan.