The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, relaunched last summer, is taking on increasingly strange shapes: this week it announced the abandonment of joint global procurement components, although, in theory, such purchases were one of the main goals of creating the alliance.
In July this year, Renault Group, Nissan Motor and Mitsubishi Motors announced a final agreement to restructure the alliance. Let us recall that the alliance needed restructuring after the scandalous arrest of Carlos Ghosn in November 2018. Ghosn is considered the main architect of the alliance, without him the alliance was cracking at the seams, accumulated contradictions poured out and created a management crisis — we told the history of the issue in a separate article.
It took almost five years for the members of the alliance to re-agree on living together. The agreement reached solved the main problem — inequality in cross-ownership of shares, but at the same time, the final agreement turned out to be surprisingly few details about why, in fact, the alliance continues to exist at all and what its member companies will do together. If the preliminary plan for reformatting the alliance, presented in February of this year, included new joint models and stated the intention to maintain joint production and purchase of components, then in the final agreement in July there was nothing of this anymore.
Now it has become clear that the practice of joint procurement in the alliance will end at the end of this year, then there will be so-called project procurement, designed for specific models and specific markets, there will no longer be any common global strategy in this regard, which means there will be no savings effect for due to a very large volume of purchases. From the point of view of business efficiency, such a decision seems absurd; it once again emphasizes that the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance today is more of a political rather than a business structure. The main proponent of the idea of preserving the alliance was the French government, which remained the largest shareholder of the Renault Group after the reformatting of the alliance.
Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi are today losing the race for leadership in the production and sales of electric vehicles to Chinese companies and they understand this very well: the main geographical areas of joint work of the renewed alliance are Latin America, India and Europe, and China is not mentioned at all in the new agreement. The Renault brand left China in 2020, Mitsubishi will leave in the near future. Nissan still remains a major player in the Chinese market, but is rapidly losing ground under the onslaught of rapidly developing Chinese brands: Nissan sales in China in January-August this year, according to CAAM (China Association of Automobile Manufacturers), amounted to 406,140 cars, an increase of 29.8%. less than was sold in the same period last year.
Updating the model lines of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi in recent years has been greatly delayed due to internal strife in the alliance; the refusal of joint purchases in this case should be understood as an attempt gain an extra degree of freedom to speed up development. The Renault Group objectively looks like the main driver of development in the alliance so far: the French company launched a giant motor joint venture with the Chinese holding Geely last summer, and the production of mass-produced electric vehicles will soon be spun off into a separate company, Ampere, with free float of shares on the stock exchange. Nissan will be one of the investors in Ampere, but it is not yet clear how the company will be connected to future Nissan models — it may not be connected at all.
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