Remember Carlos Ghosn? If you’re of a certain age, the architect of the Renault-Nissan Alliance (and later the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance) is an automotive legend. But maybe you remember instead a disgraced executive who was arrested in Tokyo, then forbidden from leaving the country, charged with all sorts of malfeasance. His dramatic escape and return to his ancestral home in Lebanon was the stuff of cinema.
But maybe you remember none of that, as it all happened in 2018-19, an eternity ago by today’s short-attention-span standards. In fact, while Ghosn was at one point a business titan, the CEO ne plus ultra, he’s now rapidly becoming a footnote: the unlikely French-Japanese conglomerate he lorded over is in tatters, with Nissan lurching toward what might actually be bankruptcy, following a failed attempt to merge with Honda.
The company is officially entering desperation territory. Automotive News (citing Nikkei and others) reports that its Yokohama HQ — “the house that Carlos Ghosn built” — could be up for sale.
Nissan is looking for a landlord and a lifeline
The tower, opened by Ghosn himself in 2009, is reportedly worth $670 million. If Nissan can find a buyer, the company plans to lease office space so that it can continue operating out of the building. To be honest, when I saw how much the HQ is allegedly worth, it struck me as rather low for a 16-year-old structure in Japan’s second largest city.
Regardless, $670 million isn’t exactly going to save the farm. Nissan lost $4.5 billion last year and has to refinance well over $5 billion of debt in 2026. CEO Ivan Espinosa has inherited the top job at a carmaker that has seen its global sales plummet since the pandemic; his stated goal now is to streamline the firm through layoffs and plant closures, shedding excess manufacturing capacity and shooting for an annual sales range of 2-3 million vehicles. He also has to deal with an unpredictable tariff situation that’s undermining the global flexibility that was once Nissan’s strength.
We’ve come a long way from the Ghosn era, when the alliance that everyone in the car business thought was a folly turned out to be a brilliant piece of corporate engineering.
Too little, too late?
Espinosa’s plan, dubbed “Re:Nissan,” combines asset fire sales with headcount slashing. It’s hard to call it a direct result of Ghosn’s overreaching, as the global economy is much different now than it was when Nissan unveiled the all-electric Leaf back in 2009 and heralded a new age of emissions-free transportation.
That said, Ghosn’s fading legend is falling into the same memory-holed realm as noted predecessors, including Lee Iacocca and Jacques Nasser. Or Jack Welch at GE. These guys were big shots in their day, but they all tried to achieve immortality in old-school industrial enterprises, where a shared passion for swashbuckling, shake-things-up management was once thought to be the way forward. Their glory was obviously fleeting, and Ghosn could go down in history as the last of his kind.
Back to the news at hand: Nissan really, really needed to merge with Honda. Consolidation is salvation. The next ten years in the auto industry are likely to be both merciless and chaotic, with carmakers that are dragging around stressed balance sheets having to make borderline existential choices about how to survive. Selling the HQ is probably unavoidable for Nissan, as are Espinosa’s other moves, but they’re also signs that much tougher decisions could lie ahead.
