The ghost of Nissan’s past is coming back to haunt its current board. Following a chaotic annual general meeting filled with investor fury, exiled former Chairman Carlos Ghosn lashed out at the automaker’s current leadership, claiming that shareholder proposals to reinstate him reflect deep anger over a massive, multi-year destruction of corporate value.
The brutal metrics and structural breakdown exposed in the fallout:
⚡ The “Dismal” 80% Valuation Wipeout
- The Stock Crater: Ghosn pointed directly to raw market facts, highlighting a staggering 80% collapse in Nissan’s share price since his highly publicized 2018 ouster.
- The Volume Plummet: Under a succession of three different CEOs, Nissan’s global annual sales volume has withered from over 5 million vehicles down to just 3 million.
- The Ghost Proposal: The operational decline triggered an extraordinary, albeit failed, formal proposal from retail shareholders at Tuesday’s annual meeting demanding the return of the fugitive executive to replace current CEO Ivan Espinosa.
📉 The Battle of Strategies: Glory Days vs. Profit Margin
- The Volume Legacy: Wall Street analysts (including Macquarie) note that Ghosn’s original era focused heavily on aggressive sales volumes, leaving Nissan reliant on steep discounts that damaged its core brand equity.
- The Defensive Retreat: Ghosn counters that Nissan has drifted into stagnation and an overly defensive strategy, opting for plant closures, job cuts, and market retreats instead of confronting fierce, low-cost Chinese EV competition.
- The Chinese Takeover Threat: Without radical intervention, Ghosn warned that Nissan risks losing its independence entirely, facing a future where it becomes “a small affiliate of a larger company, most likely a Chinese one.”
While Nissan officially dismissed Ghosn’s remarks as “speculative,” defending its steady progress toward profitability and robust liquidity, the corporate icon—currently residing in Lebanon since his Hollywood-style escape from Japan in 2019—declared that advice is no longer enough: “There is an emergency in Nissan… The only job to save the company is the CEO job, and the only profile who can make it happen is mine.”