By Norihiko Shirouzu
BEIJING (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp could divert shipments from China's Tianjin port where operations have been indefinitely disrupted after a massive explosion last week, a senior Beijing-based company executive said on Wednesday.
Shanghai and Dalian ports should have enough capacity to prevent a severe logistical problem for Toyota in the world's biggest auto market, the executive said, as global carmakers come to terms with the partial shutdown at China's main car import terminal.
"Port of Tianjin will likely be unusable for a long while, although I have no idea at the moment how long these disruptions would last," the official told Reuters, declining to be named as he was not authorised to speak with reporters.
"There are a lot of unknowns at this time."
A company spokesman in Japan confirmed Toyota was considering rerouting cars to other ports.
Huge explosions ripped through Tianjin port on Aug 12, killing at least 114 people. Investigators have not determined the cause of the blasts at the world's 10th-largest port, the gateway to China's industrial northeast.
It could take at least a couple of months for normal port operations in Tianjin to resume, research firm IHS Automotive said.
In addition to Toyota, automakers like Volkswagen AG and BMW said they had made moves to switch to Shanghai and other ports in the aftermath of the explosions.
Toyota's two final assembly plants near the port suspended their operations from Monday to Wednesday, in part to assess the damage from the blasts.
Toyota produced 432,340 vehicles at the two plants in Tianjin last year, according to IHS. It estimated a production loss of 2,200 cars per day as a result of the explosions.
The port accounts for about 40 percent of China's imported cars, the research firm said.
(Additional reporting by Jake Spring in Beijing and Minami Funakoshi in Tokyo; Editing by Stephen Coates)
