By Chang-Ran Kim, Asia auto correspondent | June 22, 2007

NAGOYA, Japan (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp. is bullish on the U.S. market and will keep adding manufacturing capacity in the region as demand grows, a top executive said, shooting down a newspaper report that the automaker was changing course to slow down expansion there.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Japan's top automaker would intentionally scale back new plant construction in North America in a shift of strategy to save costs and avoid the risk of overcapacity. Toyota was also mindful of the bigger profits it could reap by exporting from Japan in light of the soft yen, the paper said.

Over the last few years, Toyota has been adding car factories in North America at a pace of about one a year to meet a spike in demand for its fuel-efficient fleet of cars and to conquer segments in which it has a small presence.

It is also trying to reduce imports from Japan to preempt a political backlash amid the yen's persistent weakness and the company's ever-growing share of the U.S. market that has helped it topple General Motors Corp. as the world's biggest automaker.

Between a factory in Texas that began building the Tundra pickup truck last November and its eighth North American car plant slated for a 2010 start in Mississippi, Toyota is adding 600,000 units of annual output capacity in the region.

"That is pretty good evidence of our confidence in the market, and we will continue to build our vehicles where we sell them," Jim Press, president of Toyota Motor North America, told a small group of reporters.

"There has been no change in our plans for our growth strategy," he added, dismissing the report as "idle speculation."