TOKYO, Sept 26 (Reuters) - For the first time in 10 years, Toyota Motor Corp plans to shut down a line at one of its old domestic plants and shift production to another facility to boost efficiency, a business daily said on Friday.
Japan's largest automaker declined to confirm the report.
"We are considering various ways of improving efficiency in our production but no concrete decisions have been made," said spokeswoman Hisayo Ogawa.
Toyota will shift production of the Prius gasoline-electric hybrid sedan from its Motomachi plant in Aichi Prefecture to another plant by the middle of next year when the car undergoes a full model change, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
The vehicle will be built at the Tsutsumi plant in Aichi Prefecture, it said.
Such a move would likely mean a reduction in Toyota's overall domestic production capacity.
Toyota does not release figures for its domestic production capacity, although it built some 3.35 million vehicles in Japan last year.
Toyota has often been accused by analysts of carrying excess capacity and of being, in its assumed role as the bastion of corporate Japan, too reluctant to cut jobs.
Others argue, however, that while the automaker is not aggressively pursuing a sharp reduction, it is quietly making progress in closing old production facilities.
Last week, Toyota announced that it would shift its global pick-up production base to Thailand from Japan.
Some saw this development as a sign of progress in cutting surplus capacity while others dismissed it as a one-off move reflecting a near total lack of demand for pick-ups in Japan.
The auto giant's shares climbed 1.58 percent to 3,220 by the end of the morning session, roughly in line with a 1.89 percent climb in the benchmark Nikkei average.