TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Toyota Motor Corp.’s sales in markets outside of Japan, Europe and North America will likely fall this year, but the decline will be milder than the drop in overall global sales, a company executive said Friday.

Toyota, the world’s biggest car maker by sales volume, is targeting sales of 6.5 million vehicles worldwide this year, which would be 19% lower than the 8.0 million vehicles it sold last year.
Toyota aims to sell more than 2.0 million vehicles this year outside of its three key markets, after selling 2.97 million in those emerging regions last year, the Toyota executive said on condition of anonymity.
Brisk auto demand in China, which appears set to surpass the U.S. as the world’s biggest auto market as early as this year, will help limit a sales fall in those emerging markets, he said.
The upbeat comments come as Toyota’s China business has started to recover over the past few months, with sales in the country marking their second consecutive month of double-digit growth in June. Toyota executives had feared that the car maker might miss its 2009 goal of matching year-ago sales in China, because of a slide in sales earlier this year.
But a senior Toyota executive said last month that the company may be able to exceed last year’s China sales figure of 585,000 vehicles by a relatively large margin, as the company has stepped up production of smaller-engined cars to take advantage of a sales tax cut offered to those who buy cars with engines of 1.6 liters or smaller.