Toyota is to buy back as much as 1.89 per cent of its shares for Y360 billion ($A3.86 billion), raiding a growing corporate cash chest for the first time in five years, the Japanese carmaker says.
The world's largest carmaker said on Wednesday it will purchase up to 60 million shares over a 10-month period following the next shareholders' meeting in June.
It will cancel half of them to avoid sparking fears of dilution in future share sales, the company said in a statement.
The other shares will be handed over to a trust that will manage them on behalf of a new foundation to "support efforts to address mobility challenges around the world" such as traffic jams and better use of energy, it said.
The last Toyota share buy-back was in February 2009, a company spokeswoman said, adding it had repurchased 930,000 shares for 2.8 billion yen at the time.
