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Nissan is putting a new chief executive in charge as the automaker contends with slowing sales and a failed merger.
Nissan said on Tuesday that as of April 1, CEO Makoto Uchida, 58, who has led the company since 2019, will step down and be replaced by Ivan Espinosa, 46, the company’s current chief planning officer. According to CNBC, two other senior executives will step down on April 1: Chief Brand and Customer Officer Asako Hoshino and Chief Strategy and Corporate Affairs Officer Hideaki Watanabe.
Espinosa faces “a very challenging start” as CEO given “the industrywide challenges and Nissan’s performance,” Nissan’s board of directors chair Yasushi Kimura said in a Tuesday news conference, per The New York Times.
Makoto Uchida. Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
In February, Nissan canceled a $50 billion merger with Honda two months after announcing it. Honda, which has a market value of $50 billion, five times Nissan’s market cap of $10 billion, initially agreed to a merger in which it would sit side-by-side with Nissan as a single holding company. However, as talks progressed, Honda proposed turning Nissan into a subsidiary. Nissan rejected being a unit of Honda, leading the merger to break down, per The Wall Street Journal.
Related: Nissan Is Cutting 9,000 Jobs—And Slashing Its CEO’s Pay in Half
A November Financial Times report suggested that Nissan had just “12 or 14 months to survive,” but Nissan has taken steps since then to scale back production and cut costs.
Nissan is still an independent company and in operation, though it could still be searching for an outside investor following the failed Honda merger to help turn it around.
The company has faced a sales decline in its two biggest markets, the U.S. and China, according to The Times. China is experiencing a growing demand for electric vehicles met by local companies like BYD while U.S. buyers are purchasing more hybrid gas-electric vehicles from brands like Toyota.
Meanwhile, Nissan’s global vehicle sales dropped 7.8% year-over-year to 1.5 million units in the period from April to September 2024. The company’s operating profit for the first half of 2024 fell by 90% year-over-year from 336.7 billion yen ($2.28 billion) to 32.9 billion yen ($222.4 million).
This led to the automaker reporting a net loss of 14.1 billion yen ($95.7 million) in the quarter ending December 2024, plummeting from the 29.1 billion yen ($196.9 million) profit it reported in the same period in 2023.
Nissan announced a restructuring effort in November to reduce costs by $2.6 billion by cutting 9,000 jobs out of its 133,580-person workforce and reducing its global manufacturing capacity by 20%. The money from the restructuring would go back into Nissan, boosting its electric vehicle offerings in China and hybrid options in the U.S.
At the time, Uchida also said he would voluntarily cut his monthly pay in half to support the effort. In 2022, Uchida made 673 million yen (around $4.5 million), per the BBC.
Related: Should CEOs Take a Pay Cut to Avoid Layoffs and Cutting Jobs? It’s Complicated, Experts Say
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