Renault Group and Nissan Motor have announced a definitive agreement to restructure the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, but unresolved issues and “foggy area” still remained.
The plan for reformatting the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance was presented by its participants in February of this year, then it was expected that the final version of the agreement would be formed in the first quarter, but the approval process took more time and only today the press services of Renault and Nissan released releases stating that the bosses agreed on everything, although in reality this is not entirely true.
Recall that the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance cracked at the seams at the end of 2018 after the arrest in Japan of its chief architect, Carlos Ghosn, we told the story of the issue in a separate article. It took the members of the alliance nearly five years to re-agree on a conscientious life. The agreement reached solves the most important problem – inequality in cross-share ownership. Renault Group now owns 43.4% of Nissan Motor, while Nissan owns only 15% of Renault Group. Mitsubishi Motors joined the alliance only in 2016 and acts in it as a satellite of Nissan (Nissan Motor owns a 34% stake in Mitsubishi Motors), that is, in fact, does not affect the format of the transaction.
The February agreements on the redistribution of shares were slightly adjusted, but their essence did not fundamentally change. Renault Group will transfer 28.4% of Nissan Motor shares to a French trust fund, but will continue to receive dividends and profits from these shares until they are sold. The trustee has the authority to sell the shares of Nissan Motor held in the trust at any time if it is to the benefit of the Renault Group, and Nissan Motor has a priority right to purchase these shares or may make a priority choice in favor of a third party. There is no time limit for holding Nissan Motor shares in a French trust. The voting on the shares held in the trust will be neutral, except for certain specific issues. The voting rights of Renault Group and Nissan Motor will be limited to 15 percent of each other's shares, there is no specific agreement on the number of representatives on the boards of directors yet.
The main geographical areas of joint work of the renewed alliance now, as in February, are Latin America, India and Europe are named, however, all February details about new models disappeared from the description of the final version of the deal. Instead, it has been announced that Nissan will invest 600 million euros in a new electric vehicle division of the Renault Group, called Ampere, which will eventually be spun off into a separate company for an IPO.
Nissan has no direct relationship with the Renault and Geely motor joint venture launched earlier this month and, together with Mitsubishi, will only be its client.
Note that China, the largest automotive market, is not indicated in the restructuring plan of the alliance. The Renault brand left China in 2020, and Nissan is rapidly losing ground here under the onslaught of rapidly developing local, Chinese brands.
European and Japanese companies today cannot compete with Chinese companies in the pace of introducing new electric vehicles to the market. For example, the serial Nissan Ariya electric crossover presented in 2020 appeared at most dealers only this year, and even then in limited quantities, while Chinese competitors (for example, Nio) have already changed generations during this time. The sluggishness of the management apparatus of European and Japanese companies is especially clearly seen in the example of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, and there is a feeling that the reboot will not significantly change its life.
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