Nissan was desperate. Merger talks with Honda had fallen apart. The company was in the worst crisis of its nine-decade history, and the board needed someone to lead it out.
Its choice: Ivan Espinosa, just 46, and not Japanese—unusual in a country where corporate leadership has long been considered a job for a Japanese national. Espinosa remembers being shocked by the request.
The CEO jokes that he was “born in Nissan.” He was, in fact, born in Mexico, where he started with the company as a product engineer in 2003. After roles in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, he moved to Japan in 2016 and became Nissan’s chief planning officer in 2024, exposing him to all the ways the company failed to right the ship. “I knew what had to be done,” Espinosa told Fortune earlier this year. “It was obvious you had to resize the company.”
Nissan’s turnaround is about more than just whether the 93-year-old carmaker has a future.
For decades, global carmakers like Toyota, Nissan, General Motors, and Volkswagen manufactured and sold their products all over the world. But that model no longer fits today’s more protectionist, more competitive world. Nissan’s current strategy underscores this transition, as the company orients itself around two markets: China and the U.S.
“You have a China ecosystem, and you have the U.S. ecosystem,” Espinosa said. “If you want to be a global company, you need to live in both.”
Nissan Motor, founded in 1933, is the oldest of Japan’s Big Three automakers. After the Second World War, Nissan quickly embraced the global car market: It started exporting Datsun cars to the U.S. in 1958.
When Fortune debuted the current form of the Fortune Global 500 in 1995, Nissan was No. 23, with $58.7 billion in revenue. Today, Nissan is No. 168, with $79.7 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, a 4% drop from the year before. It also reported a $3.54 billion loss, one of the largest on the list.
For years, Nissan had suffered from overproduction, high costs, and slow product development, says Takaki Nakanishi, an automotive analyst at Astris Advisory, a Tokyo-based financial research firm. Back-to-back annual losses piled on the pressure and prompted shareholders to demand a fix. In December 2024, Nissan engaged in a frantic maneuver to save the company: It aimed to merge with Honda and create a car giant large enough to compete with both Toyota and Chinese EV giant BYD. Yet a few months later, talks were off, as both sides disagreed over control. Nissan’s then-CEO, Makoto Uchida, was out, and the Mexican-born Espinosa took his place.
Within six weeks, he’d developed a plan to both cut costs and keep up with the competition. The result was the Re:Nissan plan, announced in May 2025. The plan promises 500 billion yen ($3.1 billion) in savings; seven plant closures; 20,000 layoffs; and a reduction of development cycles to a little over two years.
Nissan now expects to return to profitability in the current fiscal year. But “it’s easy to cut costs,” Nakanishi says. “It’s more difficult to restore the value of the brand.”
Repairing Nissan’s business in North America, its most important market, is crucial to the brand’s comeback. The company sells just over 40% of its cars in the region—primarily, the U.S.—making it the “powerhouse” within Nissan, says Christian Meunier, the carmaker’s Americas chair.
Like the wider company, the North America division needed streamlining. When Meunier, a Nissan veteran, came back to the Japanese carmaker in 2025, he says he found a company he “didn’t recognize.” He went “super aggressive,” stripping out $2 billion in fixed and variable costs in just 12 months.
But the biggest threat to Nissan’s U.S. business didn’t come from corporate bloat; it came from Washington. In March 2025, just a few months after Meunier returned to Nissan, and a few days before Espinosa became CEO, U.S. President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on all imported passenger vehicles. (Tariffs on imported Japanese cars now sit at 15%, following trade negotiations between the U.S. and Japan.)
Trump’s tariffs snarl Nissan’s supply chains in two ways: First, they make cars and components from Japan more expensive; second, they threaten Nissan’s supply chains over the U.S.-Mexico border, which had flourished under the North American Free Trade Agreement and then the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
According to Meunier, Nissan has cut its tariff exposure from $4 billion to just $1.5 billion in 12 months. “We worked with our suppliers down to the bare bones” to identify U.S.-made components, subcomponents, and engineering work that can offset tariff exposure, Meunier says.
Mexico will remain a key part of Nissan’s North America operations. Nissan will keep producing entry-level cars, like the Sentra and Kicks, in Mexico, as these low-margin models can’t be made profitably in the U.S. Meunier pitches Mexican production as a solution to the U.S.’s affordability crisis. “People can’t afford a new car,” he says. “Having entry-level cars made in Mexico makes sense for the U.S.”
Nissan sold 361,563 cars to U.S. drivers in the first six months of 2026, an 8.3% jump compared with the same period a year earlier. But Meunier isn’t declaring victory. “People ask me: ‘Are you satisfied?’ No, I’m not,” he says. “I think 60% of the job has been done. We’ve got 40% to go.”
If you’re ranking Nissan’s most important markets, China is close behind the U.S.
Foreign carmakers that operate in the country have struggled to stay afloat as Chinese companies undercut the global competition with cheaper and, frankly, better electric vehicles. Nissan sold 653,000 vehicles in China in its previous fiscal year, down 6.3% from the prior year.
Rather than wash its hands of the China market, Nissan wants to target 1 million in vehicle sales there by the end of the decade. But China may be more useful to Nissan as a classroom than as a consumer market.
“This will sound like a crazy answer, but our collapse in China helped us. We had a massive come-to-Jesus moment,” says Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan’s senior vice president for global design.
Chinese designers worked at a pace that was “simply stunning,” he explains, and companies that couldn’t operate at that speed fell behind. “There’s no reason to do a bunch of PowerPoints and come back to the CEO three months later with a plan. It’s already too late,” he adds.
He’s taking the lessons learned from “China speed” to other markets. Nissan has reduced the number of executives involved in some design decisions from 12 to three, and is using AI and digital tools over traditional full-size clay models. Albaisa also transformed Nissan’s Los Angeles studio into a prototype design operation with just seven designers and “monster computers.”
Paradoxically, Nissan may be fortunate in that it’s going through its own painful restructuring ahead of its competitors. Honda posted the first annual loss in its history last fiscal year, and has gutted its EV plans. In April, Toyota abruptly replaced its CEO, Koji Sato, with CFO Kenta Kon after reporting a $9 billion hit to profits as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
On this year’s Fortune Global 500, six of the year’s 20 largest losses came from car companies: Stellantis, Renault, Ford, Nissan, Honda, and Geely.
Carmakers used to be the ideal global manufacturer, running vast cross-border supply chains and dominating large markets like China and India. Much of that swagger has faded as legacy carmakers are buffeted by the EV transition, new Chinese competition, and supply-chain pressures including Trump’s tariffs, rare earth export controls, and an AI-driven memory-chip shortage.
“How do we manufacture cars in a way that they reach a global market as well as hyper-regional markets?” asks Robert Duffer, a longtime auto journalist. “What sells well in California isn’t going to do a thing in Texas.”
Nissan might be turning into something akin to a “regional multinational,” sharing technology and platforms across different markets, but moving away from a single global model. In North America, it must localize production and rebuild trust among dealers; in China, it needs to move at “China speed” and export domestic innovation to the rest of the world.
But Espinosa knows he can’t go so far as to run entirely separate operations in each of the world’s key markets. “It’s easy to make one solution for China and a completely different solution for North America, but it’s crazily inefficient,” he said. “It’s just not economically viable.”
The role of Nissan’s headquarters will be to provide “guardrails,” he said, so his team can “keep innovating, keep pushing the boundaries, and make the coolest cars that drive by themselves.”
“We’re an engineering company,” he added. “Us engineering people? We like to invent things.”
This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Nissan’s high-stakes reboot and its race to stay global.”
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