BusinessDay reporter wins Toyota ‘Motoring Award’
Toyota, leader on the global automotive sales chart as well as consistent fastest selling brand in Nigeria, has voted Mike Ochonma, motoring reporter of BusinessDay newspaper, Nigeria’s leading daily newspaper in financial and business reportage as winner in the Toyota Nigeria Limited’s (TNL) “Best Motoring Journalist of the Year 2014.”
The overall winner was made public recently during the 10th edition of the best motoring journalist award at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, recently. With the 2013 edition prize slipping
off his hands by the whiskers, the reporter has consistently won the prize back-to-back since 2009.
Explaining how important the strategic synergy between the motoring reporters and Toyota business in the country, Kunle Ade-Ojo, managing director of TNL, disclosed that the occasion was put together to
recognise the motoring journalists through whose critical analysis of industry events and publications had positively presented the image sustained for the Toyota brand in the year gone by.
The managing director stated that TNL chose to detach the award from the conventional method of holding it concurrently alongside the dealerships and customers’ awards. This decision, he said, was taken in order not to diminish or becloud the level of recognition the company had to accord the motoring reporters as a result of their contributions to Toyota brand in Nigeria.
According to him, “the reward for excellence and hard work as exhibited by the overall winner, the first and second runners-up and others who did not win, respectively, is to allow more bonding time at
close quarters with you our friends outside of our office and also to appreciate your invaluable contributions to our business and celebrate the rewarding partnership which exists between your Guild and us.”
It is pertinent to assert that this partnership has remained one of the veritable tools of engendering positive and unwavering acceptance which the Toyota brand enjoys in Nigeria today, he said.
The desire of TNL in this direction, he maintained, will not only be to continually sustain this partnership but always nurture it in a manner that will be mutually beneficial to both sides.
But as an organisation, the company chief said TNL will never stop seeking ways of doing things differently, which was in strict compliance with automaker’s philosophy of Kaizen, which means ‘Continuous Improvement.’
“Doing this will remain top priority to us in TNL. It is our sincere hope also that the Nigerian motoring press will on their own part remain steadfast and more committed to be objective and be more
accurate in reporting the company’s activities, particularly at this time that government is committed to revolutionising the auto industry,” he said.
MIKE OCHONMA