When Nissan Motor's board of directors announced that Makoto Uchida would step down at the end of March, I wondered whether this professional manager, once known as a "cost killer", would think of the winter six years ago when he took over the baton.
At that time, he was faced with not only the ruins of trust after the Ghosn incident, but also a financial report of an annual loss of 671 billion yen. Six years later, the collapse of the Chinese market from its peak was like the last straw that forced the board of directors to press the "change of leadership" button.
Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida in Yokohama, Japan, February 13, 2025, local time.
Makoto Uchida's career has always been about "fighting fires".
When he took office at the end of 2019, he launched the Nissan NEXT transformation plan, which eliminated redundant production capacity and streamlined product lines with thunderous means, which did stop the financial bleeding in the short term. Net profit soared to 426.6 billion yen in 2023, and the stock price once returned to the level of the Ghosn era. However, this surgical cost-cutting strategy seems to be inadequate in the face of the century-long changes in the automotive industry.
Especially in the Chinese market, Nissan's moat, which it has worked hard to build for 20 years, is being washed away by the wave of new energy. The monthly sales of Sylphy have been halved from 38,000 to 19,000, and the terminal discount of more than 50,000 yuan for Qashqai still cannot stop the sales decline. The image of "technical Nissan" that once occupied half of the Chinese taxi market has disappeared under the impact of BYD Qin PLUS.
Makoto Uchida's understanding of the Chinese market remains in the traditional rhythm of the "five-year generation cycle". During the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, although Makoto Uchida led all members of the Executive Committee to China to experience the speed of China, he still insisted that Nissan needs a 24-month development cycle. One consequence of the slow response to the speed of China's intelligent development is that Nissan's L2 assisted driving system is useless compared to Huawei's ADS 2.0 and Xiaopeng XNGP, and the comfort label of "mobile sofa" has also been subverted by the "Queen's co-pilot".
The collapse of Makoto Uchida is strikingly similar to that of the recently fired former Stellantis CEO Tavares Tang, both of which expose the transformation dilemma of traditional professional managers. When Makoto Uchida cut 20% of production capacity, Tavares was putting 40,000 employees on the layoff list; when Nissan closed its Changzhou plant, the number of toilets at Stellantis' Italian plant was included in the cost reduction range.
This obsession with short-term financial statements eventually evolved into a misjudgment of the Chinese market. While Uchida Makoto was obsessed with why the e-Power hybrid could not enjoy China's new energy subsidies, Tang Weishi was blaming the bankruptcy of GAC Fiat Chrysler Automobiles on "ineffective partners", but turned around and exposed his speculative nature in the 1.5 billion euro bottom-fishing investment in Leapmotor.
As professional managers, their common predicament is heartbreaking. When Makoto Uchida tried to survive by laying off 9,000 employees and reducing production capacity by 20%, the board of directors had already begun to loudly conspire with Honda to merge. This deal of the century involving $60 billion eventually broke down because Honda demanded that Nissan be turned into a subsidiary. However, the cruel reality exposed at the negotiation table was that Nissan's collapse in the Chinese market had caused it to lose its bargaining power in the alliance. Honda even bluntly stated that "a change of leadership at Nissan is a prerequisite for restarting negotiations."
On the other hand, Tang Weishi, even though he clung to Leapmotor's four-leaf clover architecture and all-domain self-developed capabilities, with less than 1% market share in China and firm statements of "withdrawing from China", Tang Weishi's early dismissal was both unexpected and reasonable.
Makoto Uchida's farewell is another "lesson from the past". When the board of directors chose Ivan Espinosa, a Spanish product planning expert, to take over, the decision itself indicated a change in the rules of the game. The new head's 22 years of product development experience is in stark contrast to Makoto Uchida's background in procurement management, which means that the automotive industry has shifted its value from cost control to technological innovation.
In this era of software-defined cars, respect for localized innovation is far more strategically valuable than cost control on financial statements, and arrogance will eventually be written as a failure case in business textbooks.
