This Thursday, the leaders of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi will not meet around the table of their traditional and monthly operating council. The meeting will be held by videoconference. “We don’t need to make the trip to Japan,” we explained at Renault, “everything is going well, we’ll save ourselves an express return trip.”
This videoconference should make it possible to ratify the latest technical details of the agreement reached last week between the two manufacturers. It will then be presented to the boards of directors of Renault and Nissan. The agreement should be officially signed in the next few days, probably in early February, but the date has not yet been decided. “You have to adapt to the limitations of each person’s schedules, as well as the regulatory limitations,” specifies one from Renault. If Jean-Dominique Senard and Luca de Meo do not make the trip to Japan this Thursday, Renault’s operational teams are there to “finalize the files”.
Discussions unlocked last week
The negotiations, which have been going on for several months between Renault and Nissan, were unblocked last week. The independent directors of Nissan, considered anti-alliance, finally gave the go-ahead to a restructuring of the Alliance. It consists of a rebalancing of the cross holdings of the two manufacturers. Renault will only have 15% of Nissan’s capital, compared to the current 43%, the same level that Nissan has in Renault. Each of the two companies will have voting rights on the other’s board of directors, which was not the case before and caused a lot of frustration on both sides.
Arguments have long stumbled over intellectual property issues, with Nissan fearing sharing its patents with new Renault partners. In fact, the French manufacturer announced last November the creation of two new entities, one thermal “Caballo”, with the Chinese manufacturer Geely as a shareholder, the other 100% electric “Ampère”, which will include the American giant Qualcomm in its capital.
Once these technical questions have been resolved, it is undoubtedly politics that has finished convincing the most fervent detractors of the Alliance in Nissan. Emmanuel Macron received Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last week and assured him that the French state supports the agreement. At the same time, Bruno Le Maire wrote to his colleagues at METI, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, guaranteeing them that the State was going to act on the rebalancing of the holdings and that, above all, it would not change.
“Having a written record was important for Nissan,” we slipped at Renault.
Issues still pending
However, one issue has not been decided and probably won’t be before the deal is signed: Nissan’s stake in Ampère. The Japanese manufacturer will enter the capital of Renault’s 100% electric entity, but the amount of its participation has not yet been decided.
“Nissan estimates that Ampère is not worth 10,000 million euros of valuation as Renault calculates,” explains an expert in the Alliance.
The Japanese manufacturer, as has been mentioned for some time, will therefore not take 15% of Ampère’s capital, which would be equivalent to putting 1,500 million euros on the table. “Nissan can’t afford to pay that much,” the same source continues.
The agreement that is coming between Renault and Nissan continues, therefore, full of questions. “The most important thing for Renault is that Nissan is part of the Ampère adventure, determining the amount of its participation is important but this is not a blockade,” says one of the French manufacturer’s side. This last point that remains open, and which will need to be resolved before the introduction of Ampère in the fall of 2023, makes the case doubtful for some observers. “Renault gave in on almost everything, it had nothing to do with the negotiations. Luca de Meo, the general manager of the group, wanted to move quickly to reorganize the company, he found himself in a weak position ”, always judges this connoisseur of the alliance. .
“Not really an option”
Who from Renault or Nissan won the fight? The answer is not obvious. The two companies are now each a small thumb in the automotive world. The Renault brand, for example, sold just over 1.4 million cars in 2022, when Tesla is around 1.3 million.
“Nissan and Renault really had no choice, concludes our Alliance expert. They need each other to survive and stay in the race.”
Source: BFM TV
