By Christopher Otts
FRANKLIN, Tenn. -- When Christian Meunier took over Nissan's Americas business at the start of the year, he said the company was lost.
"There was no North Star. There was no vision. There was no direction," Meunier said in an interview.
The automaker had been slow to make decisions and was complacent with its sinking status in the U.S., he said. One of Meunier's first actions was to order corporate employees at Nissan's Tennessee headquarters back to the office four days a week. Collaboration is "very difficult" from home and problems often go unsolved, he said.
But it will take a lot more than that to reverse Nissan's slide that began nearly a decade ago. Nissan reported its fifth-straight quarterly net loss last month and it is closing seven of its 17 factories globally and cutting 20,000 jobs.
The automaker has struggled to find direction since the arrest of its longtime chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, in 2018. Its plight -- as Japan's No. 3 carmaker -- became so dire that the Japanese government last year encouraged a rushed merger with its stronger rival Honda, but the tie-up fell apart.
Meunier's task is turning around the company in its biggest market, the U.S. Sales have fallen about 40% over the past decade, and its share of the market has dwindled to 6.4%, from a peak of 8.4% in 2017, according to Cox Automotive. Nissan dealers often struggle with higher inventory levels than their competitors and frequently have to discount products to get them off the lot and earn volume bonuses from the automaker.
"It isn't that their products aren't valuable, but you kind of train people that this is the cheap one," said Stephanie Brinley, North America auto analyst at S&P Global Mobility. "Being the cheapest available and the best deal isn't always the way to generate as much loyalty as you want."
Brinley said Nissan squandered its lead in the U.S. electric-vehicle market with the Leaf hatchback and waited too long to update its Frontier pickup truck despite the popularity of midsize trucks. "They've got a lot of repair to do," Brinley said. "It will take time."
Meunier, 58 years old, who worked at Nissan for 17 years on three continents before leaving in 2019 to run Stellantis's Jeep brand, said his task is to rekindle the "fighting spirit" that led him to join the automaker in 2002. That means reversing a litany of mistakes from the past decade, from killing popular models such as the Xterra SUV to chronic underutilization at its two U.S. factories in Tennessee and Mississippi.
Nissan also hasn't brought its gas-electric hybrid technology to the U.S., leaving the company without a hybrid at a time when the technology is taking off. At Nissan's larger Japanese rival Toyota, about half of its U.S. sales are hybrids.
Meunier is pulling Nissan's hybrid plans ahead, starting next year with its most popular U.S. vehicle, the Rogue crossover. Eventually, he wants to have hybrids across Nissan's U.S. lineup.
Nissan's U.S. plants are currently producing 600,000 vehicles annually but have capacity for one million, so Meunier wants to increase production. He also plans to bring back the Xterra, a rugged off-road vehicle that represents "the perfect combination of what Nissan is about -- the affordability, the fun and the durability," he said.
Meanwhile, he said he needs to improve relations with Nissan's dealers, some of whom have struggled to turn a profit and say they have been starved for fresh vehicles.
Alan Haig, president of dealership brokerage firm Haig Partners, said Nissan has relied on offering incentives to dealers to meet sales goals to a greater extent than its competitors. "The true level of demand was a good bit lower than what they were trying to sell," Haig said.
Meunier said Nissan is still pushing its dealers with sales incentives because increasing sales is crucial for the brand's turnaround. "I think that every human being getting up in the morning needs to have a target and objective for the day or for the month or for the year," he said.
There are signs that things are improving, Meunier said. Nissan's share of U.S. retail sales was 4.9% in the most recent quarter, up from 4.1% a year earlier. "You don't do that overnight, but the momentum is there," he said.
Write to Christopher Otts at christopher.otts@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 10, 2025 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)
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