Braking bad

12 November 2019 By Pete Sweeney Follow @petesweeneypro

New CEO Makoto Uchida has inherited a pile-up. The carmaker’s quarterly sales fell, while operating margins contracted. Cost cuts aren’t helping fast enough, and full-year forecasts got revised downward, again. The only good news is that low expectations are easy to beat.

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Nissan Motor reported a 73.5% decline in second-quarter net income on Nov. 12. Retail sales for the three months to the end of September declined 7.5% year, with falls in every major market. In Europe, volumes sank by nearly one fifth.

The automaker reported negative free cash flow of 29.5 billion yen ($270 million), compared to negative free cash flow of 4.8 billion yen for the same period in 2018.

Nissan’s new management team also revised down their outlook for the whole fiscal year. Net income is now projected at 110 billion yen, 60 billion yen less than originally forecast. Its operating margin is expected to be 1.4%, down from 2%.

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