Following the news that Nissan will cut 12,500 jobs worldwide, Calum MacRae, Director of Automotive Product Development at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“The actions announced today are all a little ‘Back to the Future’ for Nissan, suggesting a few hubristic practices have crept in to the company’s day-to-day operations. Its announced reductions in capacity, workforce, complexity and model count are precisely the measures taken by Carlos Ghosn to resuscitate Nissan when the Renault-Nissan Alliance was formed 20 years ago.

“The global economic climate has not exactly been supportive recently, but that applies to all original equipment manufacturers (OEM) due to flat US and European markets, as well as declining overall sales in China.

“Nissan has invested significantly in electrification, but that sunk cost has yet to pay off with substantive electric vehicle sales.

“However, it is in the US, where its issues are most stark. In a market that declined 1.1% in 2018, Nissan’s sales fell by a disproportionate 6.6%. Those issues continued into 2019 and resulted in Nissan announcing a 20% cut in North American production in May. The suspicion is that Nissan is more reliant on passenger cars in a market that’s shifted decisively to all forms of SUVs and pickups.”