by Gilles Guillaume
PARIS (Reuters) – Renault and Nissan have announced a “major step” to lay the new foundations of their 20-year-old partnership, but while interest in the Japanese group is clear, the fallout for its French partner still seems very conditional. , Three industry sources or people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The agreement provides in detail for the capital rebalancing that Nissan has been calling for for a long time, but the Japanese manufacturer’s stake in the entity that Renault wants to create in electrics and software in order to return to the race for battery-powered vehicles still remains at stake. conditional.
Among the “new initiatives that partners can join”, “Nissan would invest in Ampère (…) with the aim of becoming a strategic shareholder”, can we read in the press release published by Renault.
“Ampere is the real test for the future of the alliance, but Nissan’s stake in the project remains unclear,” a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
“If Nissan puts money and resources into engineering – technologies and teams – that’s a pretty good sign, the alliance will at least partially continue, but for now it’s only conditional.”
Discussions between Renault and Nissan have long come up against the Japanese group’s fears relating to the technological patents it has brought to the alliance – autonomous car, batteries, hybridization – while for the past year, its French partner has been increasing agreements with d other automotive and tech players.
The “high value creation” operational projects announced on Monday to relaunch the partnership also remain very vague. Renault and Nissan evoke Latin America, India and Europe, three regions of the world where they already have factories or joint production, “according to three dimensions: markets, vehicles and technologies”.
Sources told Reuters that the alliance was considering around five projects, a relatively small number compared to the list of 10 to 15 proposed last year by Renault chief executive Luca de Meo to their Japanese counterparts.
A FREER UNION
The rebalancing of the alliance will offer the diamond group a welcome breath of financial air to finance the accelerated change to electric and the group will instruct to sell its Nissan shares “if economic conditions are reasonable for Renault Group (.. .) in an organized and orderly process,” the statement added.
“Renault will (…) finally be able to raise funds for its own ambitious objectives in terms of electric vehicles”, comments a fund manager. “Since crossing the desert with Nissan and Carlos Ghosn, the partnership has been faltering. Faced with all the recent headwinds, it makes sense to refocus its activities and focus on its main assets.”
The common ambition of this hitch, unprecedented in the automotive industry, born from the rescue of Nissan by Renault, long embodied by a single CEO, and which has become the world’s leading automotive group by sales for two years in a row, still appears for the time being. fragile.
“If Nissan recovers its voting rights at Renault, this means that the alliance is now strictly limited to the goodwill of the Japanese side, there is no longer any incentive to move forward together in this union which has become freer”, considers one of the sources.
Two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that the agreement will be publicly detailed on February 6.
“The alliance will be lasting if it produces mutual interests, this constantly forces us to ask ourselves the question of whether it continues to produce benefits, it is a good criterion”, answers another. “Institutional sustainability counts less than the sustainability of interests.”
(With Sudip Kar-Gupta and Ingrid Melander in Paris, edited by Blandine Hénault)
Copyright © 2023 Thomson Reuters
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