The automotive crisis has also shaken Japanese brands: while at Honda the executives cut their salaries and throw prestigious collaborations with Sony in the trash, at Nissan it was even decided to sell and lease back its global headquarters in Yokohama for 643 million dollars. And now it tries to restart with a more flexible industrial plan.
NISSAN’S PLAN TO TRY TO RESTART
What inevitably catches the eye is the reduction of the offer. The Japanese company has reduced from 56 to 45 the models in the pipeline destined for the global market, dividing them into three families accounting for 80% of total volumes, and into four product categories: Heartbeat, Core, Growth, Partner.
INVESTMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY
Particularly interesting is the intention to focus on onboard technology. For a long time, in fact, the Land of the Rising Sun was Asia’s hi-tech nation par excellence, a primacy now taken over by neighboring South Korea and, above all, China.
Nissan intends to close the gap by investing in the development of so-called AI-Defined Vehicles, vehicles that integrate advanced driver assistance technologies (Nissan AI Drive) and connected digital assistants (Nissan AI Partner technology). After all, the numbers coming from China, now the main market in the automotive world, suggest that users are looking for increasingly advanced vehicles.
NISSAN’S SITUATION
Although serious, the current situation Nissan is in is slightly improving, demonstrating that the self-imposed drastic measures so far (closure of seven production plants, the cut of 20,000 jobs, the cancellation of Nismo Fest 2025) are bearing fruit: the Japanese company recorded a return to autonomous operating profit in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 of 17.5 billion yen, although this represents a decrease compared to 31.1 billion yen in the same period last year.
However, global retail sales volume decreased by 5.8% year-on-year for the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, dropping from 2,397,000 to 2,257,000 units. The decline was more pronounced in Japan (-17.7%) and Europe (-9.0%), while North America showed a modest growth of 1.0%. However, there the uncertainty of trade tariffs makes everything more uncertain.
