Honda Motor and Hyundai Motor Co. have shown different figures of sales after the earthquake crippled the car production in Japan and this has helped the overseas producer to take a lead.

The Honda Motor Co. claimed that their quarterly profits dropped by 38.3% due to the massive earthquake which crippled their car production units in Japan in March.

The company has also claimed that it would slash all 600 contract workers at one of its factories in Japan. Honda is struggling to meet the parts outage after the disaster.

The net profit of Honda for this quarter was down to 44.5 billion yen and the revenue fell 2.9% to 2.21 trillion yen.

"The March quake was the biggest reason for declining profit. We simply could not produce cars due to parts shortages after the quake", said Honda spokesman Tomohiro Okada.

The massive earthquake which had a magnitude of 9.0 has destroyed many factories in North-eastern Japan, which caused huge parts shortages for Honda and other car automakers.

This disaster has caused a production loss of 58,500 cars for Honda. However, Honda does not expect that they can return to full production level in this year.