GENEVA -- Nissan has up to 400,000 units of Japanese factory capacity standing at the ready to help the automaker meet CEO Carlos Ghosn's mission to capture 8 percent of the world's auto market in 2017.
That spare factory muscle means Nissan will not be constrained as it pushes for its goal, says Trevor Mann, the automaker's chief performance officer.
Mann: No problem with global capacity
"We've recently looked and we have potentially 300,000 to 400,000 further units that we could lay down in Japan to support the U.S. and also some other regions," Mann said in an interview at the auto show here.
"We have more than that in available capacity in Japan," he clarified. "But that's the amount of it that we now expect to use."
The volume represented by Nissan's envisioned 8 percent share is a moving target, depending on global sales results. But consultants Lazard & Co. and Roland Berger Strategy forecast that global light-vehicle sales will reach 91.2 million by the end of 2016.
An 8 percent share of that would put Nissan at nearly 7.3 million sales worldwide, or about 2 million more vehicles than the company sold last year. At the end of last year, Nissan's global market share was 6.2 percent.
To address the capacity challenge, Nissan is considering -- among other options -- adding work shifts at existing assembly plants, Mann said.
Hitting Ghosn's target is as much of a production challenge as a sales mission.
Last year, Nissan's U.S. sales of the compact Rogue crossover were crimped by a shortage of factory capacity at its plant in Smyrna, Tenn.
Nissan rectified that by importing additional Rogues from South Korea and Japan.
Mann says that reclaiming the unused factory space would be a relatively easy task of putting new tooling into supplier plants and updating the vehicle plants' body shop robots and jigs.
"We've also got access to Alliance capacity around the world," he adds, referring to available assembly space at plants owned by Renault and its affiliated automaker companies, including South Korea's Samsung. "So from a capacity point of view, we're fine."
Nissan is not worried about whether suppliers will have the capacity to meet the higher production levels, adds Mann, who trots the globe addressing company readiness.
Just two years ago, Nissan officials were publicly lamenting that some suppliers were not preparing for the levels of production volumes that Nissan said it will need.
Those problems have been resolved, Mann says.
"It was somewhat of a concern, but they have reacted," he says, referring to parts companies' efforts to expand their own capacity. "And we have no supply issues at the moment."
Mann says that suppliers have stepped up to the plate on preparing for Nissan's growth because the companies believe Nissan is serious about its volume targets.
"It comes down to trust," Mann says. "Can they trust our planning assumptions and trust our numbers? Suppliers have experienced customers not delivering what they planned.
"Our suppliers are seeing that they can trust us. That's because we're delivering on what we said we would do."
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