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Business
The Ghosn excuse no longer holds up for Nissan’s decline
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
PanOrient News
By Roger Shreffler
(PROVINCE) USA: In recent days, Ivan Espinosa, Nissan’s new CEO, has been quoted blaming Carlos Ghosn for the company's business problems. It may have been partly true several years ago, but not today. Ghosn ceased being CEO in April 2017, assuming the chairman's position, while Hiroto Saikawa took over as CEO.
He would then be arrested and removed from management in November of the following year.
April 2017 was the same month that Espinosa, now 55, took a senior management position in Nissan's product planning group.
Nissan has just reported the worst financial losses in the company’s history, a net loss of 670.9 billion yen ($4.7 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 31, the largest in the company’s history.
Since Ghosn’s ouster, Nissan’s share price has fallen by more than 70 percent, while it has lost nearly $20 billion in market capitalization.
Global sales and market share have fallen by 2.4 million units from a 5.8 million-unit peak in fiscal 2017, more than 40percent, Ghosn’s final full year, and from 6.2 percent to 3.8percent.
It has witnessed sales and market share losses in every major overseas market: the US, Europe and China. In the US, it dropped from 1.6 million units in fiscal 2017 to 938,358 units (9.2 percent to 5.9 percent); in Europe, from 756,460 to 350,957 units (3.8 percent to 2.0 percent); and in China, 1.5 million to 696,631 units (5.6 percent to 2.8 percent).
Its share in the Japanese market has held relatively constant at slightly more than 10 percent, although total sales in the market (all manufacturers) have fallen by slightly more than 20 percent, from 584,053 in fiscal 2017 to 460,868 in fiscal 2024.
Analysts believe it might have to pull out of the China market, which is increasingly becoming an EV market. Nissan doesn’t have the products to compete. In Europe, its share has fallen to a more than 30-year low, meaning it is essentially a one-market company: the US.
The automaker is now planning to close as many as seven plants globally, including its Oppama plant in Japan, in addition to cutting another 20,000 workers. These cuts follow an initial 12,500 in 2019 in its failed Nissan NEXT restructuring program.
To the extent that Espinosa’s comments were reported accurately, it is not reasonable to blame Ghosn for decisions made in 2015 and 2016.
A longtime Nissan watcher, who was involved with advising Carlos Ghosn in the early Ghosn years, believes that bankruptcy may be inevitable.
Espinosa, unlike Ghosn when he came to Japan in 1999, is untested. Multiple sources have told us that he was the second choice to replace Makoto Uchida, who will go down as one of the worst presidents in Nissan’s 91-year history.
Most of the collapse has come after Ghosn’s ouster in November 2018. Uchida was named president in October 2019.
Nissan has fallen out of the top 20 in electric cars, although it was one of the first to mass-produce them with the Leaf in December 2010.
It is now planning to introduce a hybrid in the US market, more than 25 years after Toyota’s US launch of the Prius there. Too little too late? Time will tell.
In the emerging Middle Eastern and Latin American markets, Nissan’s sales and market share have fallen, putting an end to Ghosn’s dream of being a major player in both regions.
Nissan’s share last year in the Middle East was 5.4 percent on sales of 168,565 units; in Latin America, 3.9 percent on sales of 167,189 units
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