Tokyo stocks rise in early trade on weaker yen Toyota soar

TOKYO: Tokyo stocks climbed in early trading Friday as a weaker yen boosted exporters, while Toyota surged on forecast-beating quarterly net profits.The world’s biggest automaker said Thursday it posted a nearly 15 percent drop in its April-June net profit, citing a sharp rally in the yen and falling North American vehicle sales.Toyota, which also trimmed its full-year profit and sales forecast, soared 2.61 percent to 5,840 yen in early deals.The Bank of England Thursday announced its first interest rate cut in more than seven years and a fresh stimulus package to counter the fallout from Britain’s vote to quit the European Union.Those measures lifted the mood among Japanese investors, who are now focused on US monthly employment figures due later in the day, analysts said.”The BoE (Bank of England) has taken the stance that they’ll do everything they can in terms of stimulus in the face of uncertainty,” Juichi Wako, a senior strategist at Nomura Holdings, told Bloomberg News.”An easing situation is more likely to continue across the globe, and this is positive for Japanese stocks.”In early deals, the benchmark Nikkei 225 index gained 0.51 percent, or 82.73 points, to 16,337.62, building on a sharp gain of more than one percent the previous day.The broader Topix index of all first-section shares was up 0.42 percent, or 5.39 points, at 1,288.38.In forex markets, the dollar jumped to 101.33 yen from 101.22 yen Thursday in New York.In European stock trading, London, Frankfurt and Paris rose on Thursday on the news of the BoE measures.On Wall Street, the Dow closed down less than 0.1 percent, while the broad-based S&P 500 ticked less than 0.1 percent higher and the tech-rich Nasdaq advanced 0.1 percent.