As widely expected, Nissan Motor is making changes to its senior management, with a new CEO to take over from Makoto Uchida who has been in the position for 5 years. Effective April 1, the board of directors has approved a significantly renewed leadership team which will be headed by President & CEO, Ivan Espinosa.
This will be the second time that Nissan is having a non-Japanese CEO, after Carlos Ghosn. However, Mr. Espinosa, who is Mexican, will not be the only non-Japanese on the board. As Nissan is still having an alliance with Renault, the composition of the board is still mixed, as it has been since March 1999.
Guillaume Cartier, Chief Performance Officer and Chairperson of the Management Committee for AMIEO (Africa, Middle East & Europe), will have an expanded role that includes global marketing and customer experience. Other foreigners include Jeremie Papin is the Chief Financial Officer, while Stephen Ma is the Chairperson of the Management Committee for China.
Mr. Espinosa, 46, has been with Nissan for 22 years, starting in Nissan’s product planning division in Mexico. Throughout his career, he has been in product planning and spent time in Thailand and Europe before being moving to Nissan headquarters in Japan in 2016. Since then, he has been through various leadership roles, becoming Chief Planning Officer in 2024.
He has a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and business administration and, significantly, is known to be a ‘car guy’. That would put him in the company of CEOs like Ford’s Jim Farley and Toyota’s Akio Toyoda. In fact, Farley also came from a product planning background and was the first product planner at Lexus when the brand was created in the late 1980s.
Many car companies have finance guys as leaders and while people with such a background are more focussed on the bottom line, the products may not always be as exciting as consumers would like. The idea would be to play it safe rather than be adventurous and risk losing sales.
Car guys may be a bit more willing to allow the products to be more exciting and even occasionally take a chance on trying something different. We’ve seen that with Toyoda who promised to make Toyota cars ‘fun to drive, again’ and created the GR high-performance range. Farley is a bit more restricted in how much he can do but he is also trying to make Ford products more appealing and getting the brand into motorsports in a bigger way, including F1.
But before Espinosa can get to work on Nissan products, he will first have to get Nissan back from the edge and regain financial strength. At the end of last year, Nissan was said to have 12 – 14 months left to survive and if it is still the case, Espinosa has to turn around the company before the year ends.
Back in the 1990s, Nissan’s steady sales decline and revenue drop led to almost US$20 billion in debt. With Carlos Ghosn’s Nissan Revival Plan, the company managed to return to profitability within a year. But the measure taken were tough – dismantling the keiretsu system of interlocking business relationships, reducing the workforce, closing 5 factories and even selling off Nissan’s aerospace unit.
Having broken many aspects of Japanese business culture, Ghosn was of course criticised but he can be credited with saving Nissan. From having 43 models in 1999 that were not making money for the company, the Nissan range steadily expanded with fresh new products – including the Z and GT-R. But he focussed largely on the US market where he expected the quickest improvements in the business – and left other regions like ASEAN to try to survive on their own for many years.
So Ghosn could do it and perhaps Espinosa may also be able to save Nissan. It all depends on whether he can take the tough measures and in this respect, there is a belief that having a foreigner as CEO could be better since he will not feel constrained by tradition. However, unlike Ghosn who was sent from France to run Nissan (and never worked in a Japanese company before), Espinosa has spent half his life at Nissan, growing up in the Japanese system. He may be more sympathetic to appeals to not break with tradition so he will have to find a balance – and as quickly as possible.