Can a global car company survive today’s complicated world? Nissan hopes to find out

Nissan was desperate. Merger talks with Honda had fallen apart. The company was in the worst crisis of its nine-decade history, and the board needed someone to lead it out.

Its choice: Ivan Espinosa, just 46, and not Japanese—unusual in a country where corporate leadership has long been considered a job for a Japanese national. Espinosa remembers being shocked by the request.

The CEO jokes that he was “born in Nissan.” He was, in fact, born in Mexico, where he started with the company as a product engineer in 2003. After roles in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, he moved to Japan in 2016 and became Nissan’s chief planning officer in 2024, exposing him to all the ways the company failed to right the ship. “I knew what had to be done,” Espinosa told Fortune earlier this year. “It was obvious you had to resize the company.”

Nissan’s turnaround is about more than just whether the 93-year-old carmaker has a future.

For decades, global carmakers like Toyota, Nissan, General Motors, and Volkswagen manufactured and sold their products all over the world. But that model no longer fits today’s more protectionist, more competitive world. Nissan’s current strategy underscores this transition, as the company orients itself around two markets: China and the U.S.

“You have a China ecosystem, and you have the U.S. ecosystem,” Espinosa said. “If you want to be a global company, you need to live in both.”

Nissan Motor, founded in 1933, is the oldest of Japan’s Big Three automakers. After the Second World War, Nissan quickly embraced the global car market: It started exporting Datsun cars to the U.S. in 1958.

When Fortune debuted the current form of the Fortune Global 500 in 1995, Nissan was No. 23, with $58.7 billion in revenue. Today, Nissan is No. 168, with $79.7 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, a 4% drop from the year before. It also reported a $3.54 billion loss, one of the largest on the list.

For years, Nissan had suffered from overproduction, high costs, and slow product development, says Takaki Nakanishi, an automotive analyst at Astris Advisory, a Tokyo-based financial research firm. Back-to-back annual losses piled on the pressure and prompted shareholders to demand a fix. In December 2024, Nissan engaged in a frantic maneuver to save the company: It aimed to merge with Honda and create a car giant large enough to compete with both Toyota and........

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