Toyota says April China auto sales up by 12.4 pct

Japan's Toyota Motor Corp and its two local joint-venture partners sold about 85,800 automobiles in China in April, up 12.4 percent from a year earlier, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

The growth followed a 19 percent year-on-year rise in March and a 43.1 percent rise in February, the automaker said.

In the first four months of the year, Japan's biggest automaker sold 313,800 vehicles, up 20.2 percent from a year earlier.

Toyota aims to sell more than 1.1 million vehicles in China in 2014. If accomplished, the company would meet the objective to sell one million vehicles a year in China, which it had originally targeted for 2010.

Toyota's executive vice president Yasumori Ihara said in Beijing in April that over the long term, the Japanese automaker aims to double sales in China to about two million vehicles a year but gave no timeframe for the objective.

In 2013, Toyota sold 917,500 vehicles in China.