As expected, Nissan Motor CEO Makoto Uchida has confirmed that he will leave Nissan and will step down at the end of March.
According to the Nikkei Chinese website, "Nissan's board of directors believes that Makoto Uchida bears significant management responsibility for the company's poor performance, so it decided to replace the president."
In the previous article "Makoto Uchida, leave or continue to be the person who leads Nissan into the future" , we discussed that letting Makoto Uchida take charge of Nissan was actually a kind of compromise made by the Nissan board of directors in the post-Gohn era, and not the optimal solution.
In 2019, Makoto Uchida became CEO of Nissan. In the past six years, he has successively proposed the Nissan Next plan and The Arc plan. Although he was ambitious, he ultimately failed to lead Nissan out of the quagmire.
Replacing Uchida Makoto also means that Nissan intends to restart the merger negotiations with Honda that have broken down. Honda had previously proposed a merger plan to Nissan to "turn Nissan into a subsidiary", which was strongly opposed by Nissan. Not long after, Nissan and Honda issued a statement saying that the negotiations were canceled, and the much-anticipated plan to become the world's fourth largest automaker was shattered. At the same time, people familiar with the matter revealed that Honda intended to resume negotiations, provided that Uchida Makoto left Nissan.
Also leaving Nissan at the same time as Makoto Uchida are Nissan's chief brand and customer officer Asako Hoshino and Nissan's chief strategy and corporate affairs officer Hideaki Watanabe.
It is worth mentioning that the person who will replace Makoto Uchida is not the two candidates previously speculated by the media (Jun Seki, once the strongest candidate for Nissan CEO, and Jeremy Papin, the current CFO of Nissan who is closest to power), but the company's chief planning officer Ivan Espinosa. Public information shows that Espinosa, who is from Mexico, joined Nissan Mexico in 2003. In 2010, Espinosa became the chairman of Nissan Americas. Prior to that, he held several positions in Southeast Asia.
Since April last year, Espinosa has been the chief planning officer of Nissan Motor, responsible for product planning and development, and managing Nissan's global product strategy and portfolio. Some analysts said that Nissan's choice of Espinosa shows that Nissan wants to give higher priority to products. Nissan's desire to survive may have made it too busy to care about the nationality of the helmsman. In the book "The Cross-Cultural Management Battle that Crashed Nissan Carlos Ghosn", which we recommended before, the two authors of the book clearly pointed out that "after Ghosn's tragedy, some Nissan directors insisted that Nissan's CEO must be a local."
Will Espinosa from Mexico become the hero who saves Nissan? Just like Ghosn in 1999. No one can answer this question. The only certainty is that no matter who this person is, he must make Nissan, which is struggling to survive, rise again, even if it is a hellish opening that awaits him.
We will continue to follow the news of the merger between Honda and Nissan, showing Nissan's past and what the merger between car companies is all about. You are welcome to read the previous series of reports in order:
"Merger changes, Nissan refuses Honda's request to make it a subsidiary"
"Makoto Uchida, should you leave or continue to be the one who leads Nissan into the future?"
