Troubled automaker Nissan has a new CEO – but can he do the job?

Nissan faces a difficult road ahead that includes questions about whether its new CEO, Ivan Espinosa, is up to the task of leading the troubled auto manufacturer and whether its largely non-automotive board of directors is remotely qualified to run a modern auto company.

As things stand now, a week after the 46-year-old executive officially replaced Makoto Uchida, little is still known about Espinosa other than that he is Mexican-born, one of the youngest CEOs in Japanese auto industry history, the second-youngest foreigner, and worked in product planning for most of his career at Nissan including the last eight years in Japan.

In a late-March interview with Automotive News, he came across as affable and bright, but added little to his resume. He drives a Z-car to work. He’s married with two children, plays tennis and golf, but gave little indication about what his duties were as chief planning officer, a position he held between April 2024 and April 2025, or why Nissan’s post-Carlos Ghosn restructuring plan, Nissan NEXT, failed so dramatically.

When Uchida announced the plan in May 2020, he set fiscal 2023 targets of a 5% operating profit margin, a 6% global market share and 4.3 million in global sales.

He also set a sales target of 1 million electric and electrified vehicles.

One year after the plan ended, Nissan’s operating profit margin through December had fallen to 0.5%. Global market share fell to below 4%. To put that in historical context, in fiscal 2017, the final full year of Carlos Ghosn’s tenure at Nissan, global market share stood at 6.2%.

While Nissan succeeded in cutting production capacity to 5.4 million units, it failed dramatically, by more than a million units, to achieve its sales target. Fiscal 2024 plant utilization was 60%, not 80% as promised.

Veteran Tokyo analyst Koji Endo noted that in fiscal 2023, the final year of the Nissan NEXT program, only one of Nissan’s 15 main plants was operating at 80% of utilization.

It is not clear what role Espinosa played in the failed restructuring program — Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s former COO, served doubly as chief planning officer — but his titles since 2017 as a senior executive in Nissan’s global product strategy and product planning division indicate that he would have been involved.

As one former Nissan executive who’s tracked Espinosa’s career said: “Whether he’s been blocked by others in the organization is not clear. But it’s clear that he didn’t deliver.”

Gupta would be caught up in a scandal reportedly involving a female employee and forced to resign in June 2023.

Other key members of the restructuring team are being removed. Among them: Asako Hoshino, Kunio Nakaguro and Hideyuki Sakamoto. Hoshino was Nissan’s chief brand and customer officer, a position she has held since April 2020. Nakaguro was chief technology officer and Sakamoto was chief monozukuri (roughly, manufacturing and supply chain) officer. 

Nakaguro and Sakamoto joined the executive committee with Hoshino in June 2019. Sakamoto was elevated in 2020 to the board, where he’s been in charge of manufacturing and supply chain management.

While the automaker didn’t openly say that the trio was responsible for Nissan’s marketplace failures, people who know them have been hyper-critical of their performance.

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.

It is still not clear who might replace Sakamoto on Nissan’s board. The speculation is that at least one of those tabbed to fill a board vacancy is Guillaume Cartier, Nissan’s newly named chief performance officer. Others, given Nissan’s weak performance globally, will be more difficult to choose.

Five lost years and can the new team fix it?

For fiscal 2018, the year Carlos Ghosn was removed from management and imprisoned in November, Nissan’s global market share was 6.0% on yearly sales of 5.5 million units.

Sales have since fallen to 3.2 million and market share to less than 4% with the US, China and Europe all experiencing huge losses both in volumes and share.

“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 the problems today are the fault of Carlos Ghosn. Too much time 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. 

On March 7, S&P Global Ratings lowered its long-term credit rating on Nissan to ‘BB’, below every major automaker outside 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 fast improvement in Nissan’s automotive business are now remote,” reported S&P Global. “The negative outlook reflects our view that the company’s credit worthiness may continue to deteriorate as a challenging operating environment hampers profitability improvement and free cash flow losses continue.

“We expect it will take about two years before Nissan can reap the full cost-savings from restructuring. The 400 billion yen cost reduction measures will be implemented from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026. Some plant closures and job cuts will be implemented in fiscal 2026.”

S&P Global expects the competitive environment to remain challenging, costs from inflation to rise. It foresees pressure on profitability as EV sales increase. “Even if cost reduction efforts are implemented as planned, we do not see the company’s EBITDA margin reaching 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 factor in more than $5 billion in debt due in 2026.

Could Honda still be a partner? Not likely, according to our sources. Although talks between the two automakers were widely reported in December, there was never a realistic way to make a merger work without Nissan closing plants and production lines. There is too much duplication in their model lineups. 

There is also too great a gap between their management groups’ makeups, with Nissan having had only two auto executives on its 12-member board. Honda has six, who average 37 years working for Honda. One of Honda’s outside directors is a former public prosecutor. 

They might be able to team up in electric cars, where both are lagging behind industry competitors. Or there might be small projects such as joint truck production in Mississippi and Alabama, where both have assembly plants.

But since both are virtual non-players in Europe, while in China both have seen their sales collapse over the past five years, integrating their global operations is a non-starter.

“In China,” warns Richter, “we are not sure what a merger of Honda and Nissan would accomplish as both companies appear to be sinking ships. We do not see scale as the solution to their problems in China.”

“Indeed, given the steep downward trajectory of sales volume for both makers, we wonder if Honda and Nissan could be among the early ones that might throw in the towel.”

On paper, Nissan’s new management team seems better than the one before. Then again, none of them are Carlos Ghosn. In fact, none have succeeded in any marketplace. 

Christian Meunier, who quit Nissan in April 2019 and was part of the brain drain leaving Nissan after Ghosn’s ouster, joined Jeep as president and CEO of the brand in May 2019. By the time he left in October 2023, Jeep sales in the US had fallen 30%. They fell another 9% in 2024.

Meunier rejoined Nissan as chairperson of the management committee for the Americas in January. There can be no upside for the automaker’s business unless US President Donald Trump reverses his decision to hit Mexican and other foreign-built cars, including Japanese, with 25% tariffs. 

Of Nissan’s fiscal 2024 sales total in the US, more than 40% – an estimated 413,500 units – were imports, two-thirds from Mexico. Most of those from Mexico were compact and subcompact cars — Sentras, Versas and Kicks. It will take time and money to shift them to the US.

Nissan earlier had announced plans to cut 9,000 jobs from its global workforce, including 2,000 in the US. Those plans have now been put on hold, according to media reports. It is also not clear how tariffs might impact the timing of Nissan’s new and freshened model lineup announced in late March.

Jérémie Papin, who joined the executive committee as chief financial officer, oversaw the crash in sales and market share in the US market. In 2021, when Papin was named president of Nissan North America Inc. and chairperson of the management committee for the Americas, Nissan’s share in the North American market was 6.9%; in the US market, 6.2%. 

Stephen Ma, who will run Nissan’s China operation, was CFO at Nissan’s China joint venture, Dongfeng Motor Corporation, but has almost no experience in operations including marketing and sales.

And Espinosa, according to his critics, has no operational experience. And there is no one on Nissan’s board who has. 

Shukan Diamond, a weekly business magazine, has reported that Espinosa wasn’t the first choice to succeed Uchida and that the Nissan’s nomination committee was split on his nomination.

METI Car Company: Is Nissan’s non-automotive board up to the task?

There may be no fixes for Nissan short of an outside auto manufacturer with deep pockets coming in and taking over. This is easier said than done and is believed to be one reason why 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. 

Nissan named Seki deputy COO on November 1, 2019, when the automaker announced that Makoto Uchida would be its president and Ashwani Gupta its COO. Seki left Nissan in December as the odd man out in the post-Carlos Ghosn board restructuring. Now 64, he is chief strategy officer at Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn).

In all of the reporting about Uchida’s firing and Ivan Espinosa’s hiring, 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 to elevate Espinosa, a largely untested executive, in March of this year. 

If the Shukan Diamond article is accurate, there is a clear split on Nissan’s board about how to move forward, including whether to try to become a Honda subsidiary. At least three directors, including Nissan chairman, Yasushi Kimura, a retired energy industry executive, seem ready to do so.

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Roger Schreffler is a veteran Japan automotive writer and a former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.