IMonday, February 6, in London, Jean-Dominique Senard and Luca De Meo, respectively president and general manager of Renault, had to accomplish a feat: transform what looks like a death certificate into a birth announcement. The Renault-Nissan alliance is dead, long live Renault and long live Nissan!
After months of rumours, pretense and badly assumed balance of power, the two companies have achieved a capital rebalancing in which Renault simply cedes control of Nissan without any real consideration. Its participation falls from 43% to 15% of the Japanese manufacturer while the latter is finally granted voting rights for the 15% it already holds in the French.
“15-15”: behind this tennis score and its appearance of parity supposed to bring harmony between two groups who have not been able to work together for years, the end of an adventure that began twenty-five years ago is sketched out. four years. A binational alliance, poles apart from the brutality of a merger, based on mutual respect and the preservation of respective cultures. A beautiful utopia which, after having seemed to keep its promises, slowly but surely crumbled.
One-off cooperations
As in any separation, the divorced try to save face for those around them by pretending that a link remains. After all, twenty-four years together cannot be erased with the stroke of a pen.
This is the goal of the projects announced on Monday. A handful of one-off cooperations, which are commonplace in the automotive sector, but which no longer have anything to do with the original idea of the alliance. These initiatives only underline the fact that the two groups no longer have much to share apart from marginal opportunities that relate to low production volumes and peripheral markets.
Is Europe no longer a priority for Nissan? Never mind, you might as well entrust the assembly of your small city car, the Micra, to the Renault factory in Douai (North). Launching a pick-up in South America? An old project that the diamond firm is not able to carry out alone, hence the idea of resurrecting it to keep its industrial activity in Argentina afloat. As for India, the alliance has never succeeded in breaking into this market. Rather than opting for a costly and complicated withdrawal from the country, Nissan prefers to limit the damage by relying on Renault’s know-how in low-cost vehicles, while waiting for better fortune.
You have 58.41% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.