BANGKOK, July 28 (Reuters) - Thailand's biggest automaker slashed on Tuesday its forecast for total domestic car sales by all makers this year by 9 percent because of the poor performance of Southeast Asia's second-largest economy.
Toyota Motor Corp's Thai unit forecast the country's total auto sales for 2015 would fall to 800,000 cars, a sharp change from its January forecast for sales to rise by 4.3 percent.
That would mark the third consecutive year of sales declines for the domestic market of the region's auto manufacturing hub.
"The Thai economy has yet to fully recover, and with an unstable global economic outlook depressing consumer spending, this will also have an impact in auto sales this year," Kyoichi Tanada, president of the Toyota Thai unit, told a news briefing.
"It will be the most challenging year for the car market for all of us."
The number of total vehicles sold in the first half was 369,109, a 16.3 percent drop from last year, he said.
In 2014, overall domestic auto sales tumbled 33.7 percent to 881,832, hit by political unrest that led to an army coup in May that year. In 2013, sales fell after a government subsidy scheme for first-time car buyers ended.
Toyota, which has about a third of the Thai market, cut its own sales target to 280,000 vehicles in 2015 from 330,000 projected earlier.
In 2014, the company sold 327,027 vehicles in Thailand, down 27 percent from a year earlier.
Auto exports are also falling, part of a wider malaise in the export industry upon which Thailand is dependent.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Industry Ministry said annual factory output in June fell by 8 percent, the biggest drop since March 2014. That was partly due to a fall of 26 percent on the year in car exports in June.
"Exports markets are not growing, capacity utilisation is not high in Thailand," said Nattapol Rangsitpot, deputy director-general of the ministry's Office of Industrial Economics, told Reuters.
Thailand's finance ministry on Tuesday cut its economic growth forecast to 3.0 percent from 3.7 percent this year due to poor performance from the export sector. (Reporting by Pairat Temphairojana; Writing by Orathai Sriring; Editing by Simon Webb and Richard Borsuk)