Nissan tightens its focus on North America

NASHVILLE -- In a bid to turbocharge its growth in the vital U.S. market, Nissan is freeing up its Nashville-based executive team to focus exclusively on the United States, Mexico and Canada.

The move is a retreat from Nissan's seven-year-old strategy to coordinate all business in the American hemisphere under a single management team called "Nissan Americas."

That strategy has helped Nissan get up and running in new markets such as Argentina and Brazil, where the company is preparing to open its first auto plant under the guidance of experienced U.S. managers.

But Nissan global boss Carlos Ghosn is hot for bigger sales and profits. He wants the Nissan group to grow to a 10 percent U.S. market share by the end of fiscal 2016, and has freed up Jose Munoz's time to get it there. Nissan is at 8 percent now.

"We're not seeing the full potential of our brand here," says Munoz, whom Ghosn recently promoted to executive vice president over North America, with a seat on the parent company's executive board in Japan, effective Jan. 1.

"We have a big opportunity in the U.S. market, and things could be better and move faster."

His previous role as senior vice president for sales and marketing, customer quality and dealer development over the Americas required him to split his attention among the small far-flung markets of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The decision to let Latin America tend to its own needs sets up Munoz and his U.S. team to cut through what Ghosn decried this month as "softness," "deficiency," and "weaker than expected performance" around the world.

Munoz told Automotive News on Friday that the North American piece of Nissan's global plan is going well.

"We are showing results -- you can see from our sales numbers each month. We've grown by 17 percent in the first half of this fiscal year," he said, referring to Nissan's results for the fiscal year ending March 31. "That's almost double the growth of the industry in general."

He also cited these changes:

• Nissan just concluded negotiations with U.S. dealers to adopt new guidelines for how Nissan conducts stair-step incentive sales campaigns, he says. The plan, which will be presented to retailers this month in Los Angeles, will accede to dealer wishes that the programs run for longer periods, and that dealers be given more time to plan for the campaigns before they start.
• After the first of the year Nissan will accelerate a recent plan to give its regional U.S. sales managers more autonomy on sales campaigns, advertising decisions, model mixes and incentive spending.
• The company is reviewing all key operating areas, from manufacturing to marketing, to look for ways to speed up North American growth. Munoz says those plans will firm up after January.
• Munoz and his head of U.S. sales and marketing, former Chrysler executive Fred Diaz, also have agreed recently to dealer wishes to build more less-expensive model packages of popular products.

"We have some great $20,000 cars that retail for $28,000 by the time we get them in the store," says Brad Fenton, a multipoint Nissan dealer from Oklahoma City and chairman of the franchise's national dealer advisory board. "We told them that we want more of the models at the prices that customers are reading about. And they're listening to us."

Fenton says Nissan's U.S. retailers are positive about the company's structural and management repositioning. On Friday, Fenton completed the purchase of two Nissan stores in Kansas City, Mo., bringing his total to six.

"Carlos Ghosn and Jose Munoz are talking about selling more cars and helping dealers make more profit -- that's music to our ears," Fenton says. "Who has a problem with that?"