Who is the Top Salesmen (or Woman)?
It is no secret that the Toyota Hilux may be the absolute honey badger of trucks to tread on the battlefield. A small underdog, able to go toe-to-toe with 21st century military equipment.
This eludes to a question of “Who is Toyota’s top salesperson?”
It is a question my buddy and I constantly poke fun at. But in all seriousness, companies are not allowed to support insurgents or terrorist organizations, yet they still somehow have half the world’s supply of Toyotas (but us Yanks still can’t manage to have them in the good ol’ US of A). I have not seen Toyota receive a angry letter from our most gracious and holy emperor Uncle Sam, giving them a smack on the bum for being naughty.
ABC news wrote a piece on it in 2014. Figured I would include my “Analyst Comments” on the matter. In the article, they ask the same question (https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-officials-isis-toyota-trucks/story?id=34266539). Toyota apparently does not know how ISIS was able to get so many trucks. Come to find out, Toyota thought of the solution already. They put it in their terms of service or sale saying they “have a strict policy to not sell vehicles to potential purchasers who may use or modify them for paramilitary or terrorist activities.” Folks, we are saved!!! Their policy says they are not allowed to do it, so therefore folks don’t just ignore it right?
Wrong. Just like gun bans don’t work (sorry to the folks who may take offense that), banning a practice or the sale of something does not work. Get this, according to the article “Toyota’s own figures show sales of Hilux and Land Cruisers tripling from 6,000 sold in Iraq in 2011 to 18,000 sold in 2013 before sales dropped back to 13,000 in 2014”. Folks, that is what you call an “indicator”. I would bet that if you did a study on Toyota Hilux sales and correlated that to insurgent / terrorist activity, there would indeed be a connection. Now, I have not done the research, and I am going to commit an analytical sin by just making the assumption without any real data.
What is my assumption? That Toyota does indeed know that there is at least a chance that when sales surge in..um…contested regions, it is likely due to some unsavory folks wanting to start up some kind of unsavory crusade. The logic is there (maybe not sound logic). Now, Toyota and the logistics company responsible for shipping the vehicles to the region of Iraq around 2014 did say that “[they] have no way to know and therefore cannot comment.” Ok….well they must have some idea.
If I was a targeter working that target set, I would certainly put a little alert on Toyota’s quarterly reports on sales to contested regions. One could say that a spike in truck sales could be an indicator that “sh*t is about to go down” (maybe not the technical term, but I have used it in a brief before).
If they use that indicator as a “hook” (a term used to describe a starting point of analysis when looking at a problem), it should be possible to start backtracking to who sold or was importing those vehicles. And that would then allow my buddy and I to finally have the answer to “Who is Toyota’s Top Sales Rep?”.
Alas, a mystery that we will never get to solve. I pray one day we Americans will be blessed with the Hilux just like the ones sold to insurgents.
Stay frosty,
AP1984
