Toyota Hands Its U.S. Business to Mark Templin as Ted Ogawa Returns to Japan
Ogawa, CEO since April 2020, moves to a Senior Fellow role in Japan. Hiroshi Nambu, Toyota's global planning chief, takes over as chief operating officer.
Toyota is changing the top of its North American business. Mark Templin, now executive vice president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), becomes president and CEO on January 1, 2027, the company said on November 5. He replaces Ted Ogawa, who has run the region since April 2020 and is heading back to Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in Japan.
Templin takes over a business that has only just recovered. North America earned ¥132 billion (about $830 million) in Toyota's April–September half after a tariff-driven loss a year earlier, as we detailed in our breakdown of Toyota’s first-half results.
Who moves where
Ogawa stays on as CEO through December 31, then serves as Senior Executive Advisor from January through March. In April he takes up a Senior Fellow post at TMC, where Toyota says he will oversee external affairs for some Toyota-owned businesses.
Templin's current job goes to Hiroshi Nambu, president of TMC's Business Planning & Operation division, which handles planning across sales, operations, mobility and the value chain. Nambu joined Toyota in 1993 from Keio University's law faculty and knows the U.S. operation: he worked at Toyota Motor Sales USA and, from 2004 to 2007, coordinated product planning between Toyota's American sales, manufacturing and technical arms.
Templin comes from the sales, Lexus and finance side of the company. According to his Toyota biography, he joined Toyota Motor Sales in 1990, later ran the Lexus division in the U.S., and in 2013 became executive vice president of Lexus International, which Toyota describes as the first time a non-Japanese executive led an operational division at its Japanese headquarters. He has also served as president and CEO of Toyota Financial Services in the U.S.
What Ogawa leaves behind
Ogawa's tenure ran through the pandemic, parts shortages and the tariff shock, and Toyota's North American footprint grew anyway. The biggest project is Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina, the company's first in-house battery plant outside Japan, which opened in 2025. Toyota puts that investment at nearly $14 billion and up to 5,100 jobs; the cells it builds are tested at Toyota’s new battery lab in Michigan.
Toyota has also committed up to $10 billion more to U.S. operations over five years, which it says lifts its total U.S. investment to nearly $60 billion. The latest piece is a $3.6 billion expansion in San Antonio worth about 2,000 jobs, the second assembly line that brings Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. Toyota counts roughly 65,000 employees in North America.
What changes for buyers
Nothing right away. Pricing, product plans and dealer allocations aren't tied to a January handover, and Toyota frames the appointments as part of developing global leaders and tightening links between its regions, not as a change of strategy. Templin's first tests are already visible: hybrid supply so tight that Toyota reported six days of hybrid inventory in the region at the end of September, the Tacoma's move north, and tariffs, which Toyota blames for last fiscal year's North American loss. Our analysis of Toyota’s latest earnings looks at what that means for RAV4 and hybrid shoppers.
