Just over a month into merger talks between Honda and Nissan, they have already reached an impasse.
On December 23 last year, Honda and Nissan held a press conference in Tokyo to officially announce the merger. Honda President Toshihiro Mibe said at the meeting that by June 2025, Honda and Nissan will establish a joint holding company, and both Honda and Nissan will be subsidiaries of the holding company.
On December 23, 2024 local time, Honda and Nissan Motor Company announced the official launch of business merger negotiations.
However, this plan went astray. According to the latest reports from multiple Japanese media, as the negotiations deepened, Honda proposed a new merger plan to Nissan, requiring "Nissan to become a subsidiary of Honda." The report said that Honda's plan was strongly opposed by Nissan because Nissan was looking forward to an equal merger.
However, how many people would think that the relationship between Honda and Nissan is equal? People assume that Nissan is always the weaker party in the negotiation. Before proposing to turn Nissan into a subsidiary, Honda proposed a task that seemed almost impossible to accomplish to Nissan: Honda required Nissan's operating profit to increase by at least three times, which was the prerequisite for the merger. However, for Nissan, which was already on the verge of bankruptcy, such conditions were too harsh.
According to the Nikkei Chinese website, "Honda believes that Nissan's business restructuring will take a long time, so it proposed to turn Nissan into a subsidiary." Japan's TBS TV station summarized the matter as "(Honda and Nissan) find it difficult to work together."
In fact, there was one person who was not optimistic about this relationship from the beginning. This person was Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn has many labels, including former chairman of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, former CEO of Nissan, etc. After the "Ghosn incident", Ghosn was an international fugitive "imprisoned" in his hometown of Lebanon.
Two months ago, in Lebanon, Ghosn expressed his views on the merger of Nissan and Honda through the Internet. Judging from the years of disputes between Ghosn and Nissan, no one knows better than Ghosn how "impossible" it is to promote the merger of the two companies to achieve real synergy, because he failed, and lost completely.
Ghosn said a lot, "You have to understand that Honda is a very strong engineering company, and Nissan is also proud of its engineering technology. The key question is, if this is a merger or just an alliance, what technology will the new company adopt? It is certain that this will be a very difficult decision."
Ghosn has suffered this kind of hardship. When he led the Renault-Nissan Alliance, he indirectly caused the failure of the epoch-making Leaf. In the book "Carlos Ghosn's Cross-Cultural Management War at Nissan", the author details the disagreement between Renault and Nissan. Although on the surface "Renault and Nissan can achieve cost reduction by sharing parts and using large scale", in reality "the engineers of the two companies are dissatisfied with each other" and regard their own technology as authoritative. "Nissan thinks that Renault's people are a bit lazy and can't solve problems on their own; Renault thinks that Nissan is arrogant, rigid, and hopelessly bound by rules." In the end, Ghosn let "Renault and Nissan go their own way." At that time, "electric vehicles had just appeared, and facing an uncertain future, he himself couldn't put all his eggs in one basket."
The author of "Crashing Nissan" believes that the prerequisite for the success of the Renault-Nissan alliance is that both parties must overcome the huge gap between them, the language gap, the corporate culture gap, the market coverage gap and the national political gap.
Obviously, Honda and Nissan don't need to think so much. As Japanese automakers, there is no language barrier between them, nor are there invisible shackles such as national politics. But to reach the stage of merger, it seems that it is still harder than climbing to the sky.
We will continue to follow the news of the merger between Honda and Nissan, showing Nissan's past and what the merger between car companies is all about. You are welcome to read the previous series of reports in order:
