According to foreign media reports, three people familiar with the matter revealed that the Nissan Motor’s board of directors will hold a meeting on March 11 to discuss the potential successor of CEO Makoto Uchida. Due to the poor performance of the Japanese automaker business, Makoto Uchida’s status has become increasingly unstable.
According to Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun, the automaker is considering three foreign candidates to take on the position. The report quoted an unnamed person as saying that the three were Nissan’s current chief financial officer Jeremie Papin, chief performance officer Guillaume Cartier and chief planning officer Ivan Espinosa.
Another source said the three could be appointed as interim or transitional heads, allowing the board to have more time to find a long-term successor. A Nissan spokesperson declined to comment on the above report.
Previously, the collapse of Nissan’s merger negotiations with Honda caused Makoto Uchida to be dismissed, which triggered speculation from the outside world about Foxconn’s investment in Nissan. Recently, it has been reported that Jun Seki, who has worked for Nissan for 30 years and is currently the chief electric vehicle strategy officer of Foxconn, has become a popular candidate for Nissan’s new CEO. He may take the helm of Nissan as a “dark horse” and push Nissan’s merger negotiations back on track.
In recent years, Nissan has been in trouble. At the end of 2018, former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn was dismissed, opening the curtain on this protracted drama. If Makoto Uchida resigns, it will mean that Nissan has replaced four CEOs in less than six years.
Nissan had also had a temporary person in charge before. In 2019, the company appointed veteran Yasuhiro Yamauchi as interim CEO after Carlos Ghosn’s successor Hiroto Saikawa was fired.
Nissan is looking for new vitality in the dilemma of frequent leadership changes, aging product lineup and fierce competition with American and Chinese automakers. But Nissan is currently in a more difficult situation than ever due to worsening financial situations and increasingly debt maturity.
Makoto Uchida once said that solving the current dilemma of the third largest automaker in Japan is the most pressing issue he has to solve, and he is willing to step down afterwards.