AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)09/27 Report--

Affected by this year's COVID-19 epidemic, many multinational car companies feel the severity of the impact on the group, resulting in a decline in sales performance. Thanks to the rapid control of the epidemic in China, it has helped many car companies achieve stable sales, allowing them to expand the layout of the Chinese market one after another. In response, Nissan also said it would expand the layout of electrified models in the Chinese market.

According to foreign media reports, Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida recently said that the company plans to continuously improve the layout of new models in the Chinese market over the next five years, including the launch of electric cars, to help Nissan return to profitability.

Nissan is scheduled to launch nine new or redesigned electric vehicles, including plug-in and hybrid vehicles, in China, the world's largest car market, by 2025.

In the past, under the management of former CEO Ghosn, Nissan's brand could be pushed to the top of millions of sales and the top three Japanese brands in the Chinese market. Dongfeng Nissan has held on to the market with a slight increase of 0.3 per cent over the past year since Mr Ghosn's accident, but failed to complete its annual task of total sales of 1.17 million.

At the same time, it forms a sharp contrast with competitors Toyota and Honda. In August, Toyota's sales in China increased by 27.2%, while Honda's sales rose 19.7% from a year earlier. Nissan fell by-2.4%. It is worth noting that this is the trend of continuous growth of the domestic market for many months since the recovery of the epidemic.

It is even more serious for the global market, with Nissan's global sales falling 11% in fiscal year 2019 (April 2019-March 2020). Because of aging product lines and restructuring costs, Nissan lost as much as $6.2 billion in fiscal 2019, which Nissan blamed on the poor management of its former CEO, Carlos Ghosn (Carlos Ghosn).

Based on the above, Uchida also believes that the growth of the Chinese market is still an important part of Nissan's recovery from the after-effects of the epidemic, and sales in China are still a bright spot and have fallen only slightly by 1% since the outbreak. And contributed 1/3 of Nissan's global sales.

In response, Nissan has pledged to cut annual fixed costs by 300 billion yen ($2.84 billion) to three key markets in China, the US and Japan. At the same time, Nissan also said that to boost its financial position, it plans to issue $8 billion of denominated bonds in an effort to enhance liquidity to ensure the smooth implementation of our business transformation plan.

Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China passenger car Association, also said: "Nissan's advantage in China lies in its attractive brand strength accumulated over the years through competitive models." But compared with the performance of Toyota and Honda in China, both have proved their strength after innovation and new product replacement.

At present, Dongfeng Nissan sells more than 12 models in China, but only Xuanyi, Xiaoke and Qijun account for 70%, while the total sales of the other nine models are less than 30%, which is extremely unbalanced. Although Dongfeng Nissan Xuanyi remains in the forefront of the domestic car market all the year round, it is more likely to be favored by more consumers because of the lower threshold for entry-level models. And Xiaoke, Qijun has been because of product backwardness can only rely on price for quantity to maintain.

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