Nissan faces a challenging road ahead, including questions about whether its mostly non-automotive board of directors is even remotely qualified to lead the disturbed automaker and whether its new CEO, Ivan Espinosa, is capable of leading the troubled automaker.
As things stand now, a week after the 46-year-old professional actually replaced Makoto Uchida, much is still known about Espinosa other than that he is Mexican-born, one of the youngest CEOs in Chinese vehicle business background, the second-youngest stranger, and worked in product preparing for most of his career at Nissan including the last eight years in Japan.
He appeared friendly and talented in a late-March meeting with Automotive News, but his begin didn’t much help. To job, he uses a Z-car. He’s married with two children, plays tennis and golf, but gave little indication about what his duties were as chief preparing officer, a position he held between April 2024 and April 2025, or why Nissan’s post-Carlos Ghosn restructuring program, Nissan NEXT, failed but significantly.
When Uchida made the announcement in May 2000, he had fiscal 2023 goals for a 5 % operating profit margin, a 6 % global market share, and 4.3 million in global revenue.
Additionally, he established a million electrical and electric vehicle revenue goal.
One year after the program ended, Nissan’s operating , profit margin through December had fallen to 0.5 %. Global market share decreased below 4 %. In historical terms, the global market share for Carlos Ghos n’s final full year at Nissan stood at 6.2 % in fiscal 2017.
While Nissan succeeded in cutting manufacturing capability by to 5.4 million products, it failed drastically, by more than a million units, to reach its sales goal. Utilization at the Fiscal plant in 2024 was 60 %, not the goal’s goal of 80 %.
Only one of Nissan’s 15 major crops was operating at 80 % of capacity in governmental 2023, the last year of the Nissan NEXT program, according to former Tokyo scientist Koji Endo.
It is not clear what part Espinosa played in the unsuccessful restructuring program — Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s past COO, served equally as general planning officer — but his titles since 2017 as a top executive in Nissan’s international product strategy and product planning division indicate that he would have been involved.
One former Nissan executive who has followed Espinosa’s career said,” It’s not clear whether he’s been blocked by others in the organization.” However, it is obvious that he failed to deliver.
Gupta would be caught up in a scandal reportedly involving a female employee and forced to resign in June 2023.
Other important members of the restructuring team are being fired. Asako Hoshino, Kunio Nakaguro, and Hideyuki Sakamoto are just a few of them. Hoshino was Nissan’s chief brand and customer officer, a position she has held since April 2020. Sakamoto was the chief monozukuri ( roughly, manufacturing and supply chain ), and Nagoro was the chief technology officer.  ,
Nakaguro and Sakamoto joined the executive committee with Hoshino in June 2019. In charge of manufacturing and supply chain management, Sakamoto was elevated in 2020 to the board.
People who know the trio have been extremely critical of their performance, despite the automaker’s insistence that they are to blame for Nissan’s failures in the marketplace.
Uchida and Sakamoto will formally leave the board at the automaker’s June general shareholders meeting on June 20 to be replaced by Espinosa and some still-to-be-disclosed others.
Who might take Sakamoto’s place on Nissan’s board is still a mystery. According to rumors, Guillaume Cartier, Nissan’s newly appointed chief performance officer, will be one of those chosen to fill a board vacancy. Others, given Nissan’s weak performance globally, will be more difficult to choose.
Can the new team recover from five years of lost time?
Nissan’s global market share for fiscal 2018 was 6.0 % on yearly sales of 5.5 million units, the year Carlos Ghosn was removed from management and imprisoned in November.
Since then, sales have decreased to 3.2 million and market share has fallen to less than 4 %, with the US, China, and Europe all experiencing significant volume and share losses.
” They’ve had five to six years to fix the problem”, said Chris Richter, managing director in Tokyo at CLSA.
” They can’t say that Carlos Ghosn is to blame for the problems we have today. Too long has passed.
Meanwhile, the three largest credit rating agencies — Fitch, Moody’s and S&, P Global — have downgraded Nissan’s credit rating to junk status.  ,
S&P Global Ratings dropped its long-term credit rating for Nissan to’BB’ on March 7, falling short of every major automaker outside of China, including Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi Motors, Hyundai, Kia, General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Renault. Toyota received an A rating, Honda, Hyundai and Kia A-, Mitsubishi Motors and Renault BB .
” Prospects for a quick improvement in Nissan’s automotive business are now unknown,” S&, P Global, said. Our assessment of the company’s creditworthiness may continue to decline as a challenging operating environment prevents the company’s profitability improvement and free cash flow losses.
” We expect it will take about two years before Nissan can reap the full cost-savings from restructuring. From fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026, the 400 billion yen cost reduction measures will be in effect. In fiscal 2026, some plant closures and job cuts will be made.
S&, P Global , expects the competitive environment to remain challenging, costs from inflation to rise. It anticipates pressure on profitability as EV sales rise. Even if cost reduction initiatives are carried out as planned, we do not anticipate the company’s EBITDA margin to increase to 6 % in the next one to two years.
The forecast did not include the impact of US tariffs on Nissan’s Mexican holdings, where the automaker operates two vehicle plants and a large transmission plant.
It did account for the additional$ 5 billion in debt due in 2026.
Could Honda still be a business partner? Not likely, according to our sources. Although discussions between the two automakers were widely reported in December, there was never a feasible way to implement a merger without Nissan shutting down factories and production lines. Their model lineups are overly duplicative, in my opinion.  ,
With only two auto executives on its 12-member board, Nissan has had to have two auto executives. There is also a large gap between the management groups ‘ compositions. Six Honda employees work for Honda on average for 37 years. One of Honda’s outside directors is a former public prosecutor.  ,
They might be able to work together on electric cars, where both are trailing behind industry rivals. Or there might be small projects such as joint truck production in Mississippi and Alabama, where both have assembly plants.
Integrating their global operations is a non-starter because both are virtual non-players in Europe and both are experiencing sales declines in China over the past five years.
We are unsure what a merger of Honda and Nissan would accomplish because both companies appear to be sinking ships, warns Richter. We do not see scale as the solution to their problems in China.”
Given the steep decline in both manufacturers ‘ sales volumes, we wonder if Honda and Nissan might be among the first to consider folding the company in the towel.
On paper, Nissan’s new management team appears to be more effective than it was in the past. Then again, none of them are Carlos Ghosn. None, in fact, have had success in any marketplace.  ,
Christian Meunier,  , who , quit Nissan in April 2019 and was part of the brain drain leaving Nissan after Ghos n’s ouster, joined Jeep as president and CEO of the brand in May 2019. Jeep sales in the US had dropped 30 % by the time he left, in October 2023. In 2024, they dropped another 9 %.
Meunier rejoined Nissan as chairperson of the management committee for the Americas in January. If US President Donald Trump does not reverse his decision to impose 25 % tariffs on Mexican and other foreign-built vehicles, including Japanese ones, there can be no benefit to the automaker’s business.  ,
Of Nissan’s fiscal 2024 sales total in the US, more than 40 % – an estimated 413, 500 units– were imports, two-thirds from Mexico. Sentras, Versas, and Kicks were the most common compact and subcompact vehicles made in Mexico. They will require a lot of time and money to move them to the US.
Nissan earlier had announced plans to cut 9, 000 jobs from its global workforce, including 2, 000 in the US. According to media reports, those plans have now been put off. Additionally, it is unclear how tariffs might affect the timing of Nissan’s new and updated model lineup, which was unveiled in late March.
Jérémie Papin, who became the executive committee’s chief financial officer, was in charge of the US market crash in terms of sales and market share. Nissan’s share in the North American market was 6.9 %, and in the US market, 6.2 %, when Papin was appointed president of Nissan North America Inc. and chairperson of the management committee for the Americas.  ,
Stephen Ma, who will lead Nissan’s China unit, previously held the position of CFO at Dongfeng Motor Corporation, but has little marketing or sales experience.
And Espinosa does not have any practical experience, according to his critics. And there is no one on Nissan’s board who has.  ,
Espinosa wasn’t chosen to succeed Uchida, according to Shukan Diamond, a weekly business magazine, and his nomination was split by the Nissan’s nomination panel.
METI Car Company: Is Nissan’s non-automotive board up to the task?
Nissan might not have any solutions if not for an outside automaker with big pockets that steps in and takes control. This is simpler to say than to do, and it is thought to be one of the reasons Honda backed out of a proposed merger in February.
Talks with Foxconn, reportedly another potential partner, should only be taken seriously if Nissan is making a full-throated move into electric vehicles ( it can’t ) or if it wants to bring back Jun Seki in some capacity.  ,
On November 1, 2019, Nissan announced that Makoto Uchida would lead the company, and Ashwani Gupta would become its CEO. The automaker also named Seki as its deputy COO. Seki left Nissan in December as the odd man out in the post-Carlos Ghosn board restructuring. He is currently 64 years old and head of Hon Hai Technology Group, a Taiwanese electronics company.
There is only one major media article about Nissan’s board, which voted unanimously to promote Uchida in October 2019 and then, with many of the same members, voted unanimously to elevate Espinosa, a largely untested executive, in March of this year, in spite of all the reporting about Uchida’s firing and Ivan Espinosa’s hiring.  ,
If the article in Shukan Diamond is accurate, Nissan’s board is split on how to proceed, including whether to try to form a Honda subsidiary. Yasushi Kimura, a retired executive in the energy sector, is one of at least three directors who appear willing to take the action.
Roger Schreffler is a veteran Japan automotive writer and a former president of the Foreign Correspondents ‘ Club of Japan.