The man behind South Africa’s biggest car company

Andrew Kirby is the president and CEO of Toyota South Africa, which has dominated the country’s new car sales for 44 years.

In an interview with AutoTrader South Africa CEO George Mienie, Kirby revealed his personal life journey and the road to the top post at Toyota South Africa was not clear-cut.

“I wanted to be family man, I wanted to be good husband, I wanted to be a man of faith, but I didn’t have a clear career goal at all,” he said.

He explained he held 19 roles throughout his career, many of which he would never have seen himself in and only two for which he knew what his responsibilities would be.

Starting with his formative years, Kirby described himself as an “all-rounder” in school.

His father encouraged him to take up sports, a recommendation he took very seriously, as he ended up playing rugby, soccer, hockey, tennis, and squash at school.

Kirby said that his sporting skills and experience taught him important lessons for the later parts of his life.

Kirby’s father also had an influential impact on his career choices.

“I admired my father. He was in the automotive industry in a senior position in the corporate world, and I thought that was cool,” Kirby said.

“I could see myself being in corporate and hopefully rising to be an executive but not necessarily in the motoring industry.”

“Later on in my teenage years, I felt I wanted to be an engineer and that is what I did pursue, but I didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to be.”

Kirby completed a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Cape Town before getting his first job in the gold mining industry for Anglo American, where he worked for three and a half years.

Kicking things off with cars

He switched gears into what would become a three-decade journey in the automotive industry in 1994, when he became BMW’s general brand manager.

His 11 years at BMW included three years working in the US, which would turn out to be an important learning experience in his career — albeit through a baptism of fire.

“I would honestly say that in the first three months, I didn’t know what they were talking about, even though they were speaking English,” Kirby said. “I really thought I joined a different industry.”

“It was a big opportunity to learn to work cross-culturally, work with very divergent views and ways of thinking.”

“I spent some time on the West Coast and on the East Coast and it was like two different countries.”

Kirby’s move to Toyota came in January 2005, but not as a result of proactively looking for other opportunities.

“There was a fairly clever head-hunter who disguised himself as a customer, and he said he had a customer complaint,” Kirby explained.

“I contacted him to see how I could help, and he eventually persuaded me to at least look into joining Toyota.”

“I started having discussions with former Toyota SA and Europe CEO Johan Van Zyl. He was very persuasive.”

“It was a promotion for me, it was a bigger job and [it offered] the opportunity to work in a company that had very strong local leadership.”

Kirby subsequently took up the job at Toyota SA as senior vice president for sales and marketing.

Big change in company culture and strategy

He acknowledged that moving to the Japanese company was “tough” and that he really struggled for the first few years.

He explained that BMW had a dynamic, quick-moving working environment with a focus on individual performance but few checks and balances.

“Moving to Toyota was completely the opposite,” he said. “It was a lot more about consensus-building, it was — at that stage — getting a lot of input from Japan and getting their approval,” Kirby said.

“I struggled with that in the beginning, but over time, started to learn the value of it.”

“The process in Toyota is a lot of very detailed thought and preparation and very fast execution.”

“I had been used to not a lot of thought. Execute, but then rework, rework, and rework, until you get it right.

“In Toyota’s environment, you cannot really get things wrong; you need to do it correctly in the beginning.”

Kirby held the position for six years before shifting to general manager of Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus.

This included a stint in Japan as Lexus global product and marketing general manager, which required that he travel all over the world to help develop Lexus International.

In July 2013, Kirby returned to South Africa and was appointed Toyota SA’s senior vice president of corporate administration.

In this capacity, he said his mechanical engineering background helped tremendously in helping him understand the manufacturing side of the business.

Kirby was promoted to Toyota SA executive vice president and chief operating officer in January 2016.

Three months later, he was promoted Toyota SA CEO, with Van Zyl being appointed to the position of Toyota Europe CEO.

Speaking of Toyota South Africa’s milestones since he took over as CEO, he said he is most proud of how the company has responded to crises — including the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 riots, and the 2022 floods.

The latter had a particularly big impact on Toyota’s operations at its Prospecton assembly plant in Durban.

The flooding caused irreparable damage to 4,596 vehicles and a loss of about 45,000 units that could have been produced were it not for repairs and rehabilitation of the plant.

Toyota’s record market share in South Africa

Kirby’s sound handling of the floods helped earn him the award for Business Leader of the Year 2022.

However, he has credited the team around him for a collaborative effort in which he maintains he “only played one small part”.

Under Kirby’s leadership, Toyota’s share of new vehicle sales in South Africa surged to 26.8% in 2023, the highest on record.

The company’s total sales improved 8% year-on-year despite overall new car sales in South Africa recording a fairly flat increase of 0.5%.

Outside of his job, Kirby enjoys mountain biking and kite surfing, two sports that help him relax when he has an opportunity.

Kirby’s advice to young people is to be more adventurous and take time to enjoy the moment, rather than always focusing on the next big thing.