(Bloomberg) — Nissan Motor Co. is set to name company insider Ivan Espinosa to replace Chief Executive Officer Makoto Uchida and helm the battered Japanese carmaker as it looks to secure a financial backer and stabilize its foundering business, NHK reported.
Espinosa joined Nissan in 2003 and currently serves as chief planning officer. Uchida will step down at the end of March, NHK reported, without saying where it got the information. It wasn’t clear from the report whether Espinosa would be appointed permanently or on an acting basis.
Plucked from a thin internal bench, Espinosa assumes the huge task of reversing Nissan’s fading fortunes and finding a business partner in the wake of its failed tie-up with Honda Motor Co. Nissan has stumbled from one crisis to another since the 2018 ouster of all-powerful Carlos Ghosn, who pulled the carmaker out of its last brush with extinction in 1999.
Uchida’s leadership had been under heavy scrutiny since November, when Nissan reported a 94% drop in fiscal half year net income alongside plans to cut 9,000 jobs and reduce production capacity by 20%.
A month later, the 58-year-old penned an agreement to combine with Honda under a single holding company in a deal that would have created one of the world’s biggest carmakers. That could have given the carmaker a fighting chance against local giant Toyota Motor Corp. and new competitive threats like China’s BYD Co.
Instead, the deal fell apart in February as the two legacy brands, evidently at odds over an inherent power imbalance, failed to reach an agreement and formally parted ways.
The Japanese carmaker was looking for a fresh ally, Bloomberg reported in February, ideally a company from the technology sector that’s based in the US.
The collapse of its deal with Honda might have reopened the door to Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the Taiwanese iPhone maker commonly known as Foxconn, which maintains aspirations to leverage its experience in electronics to nudge its way into the business of manufacturing electric vehicles.
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