Le Figaro: Renault And Mitsubishi Talking Tie-up (Sorry, No Shibari Pictures)

Carlos Ghosn and Osamu Masuko CEO of MitsubishiRenault chief Carlos Ghosn is reaching out, forging foreign alliances with a heavy emphasis on emerging markets. “Faced with the slump in the European markets,” writes the French Figaro, Renault is “edging closer to Mitsubishi.” Nothing is official, and if you ask on the record, you get firm denials, such as the “this is not true,” told to Reuters by a Mitsubishi Motors spokesman. Behind the scenes, there are traces of heavy petting. Let’s look into them.The Japanese bride, Mitusbishi, needs to get hitched to a bigger partner badly. In calendar 2012, the diamond brand made a little over 1 million units globally, about half of them at home in Japan, the other half abroad. Some 70 percent of the Japanese production were exported. At home in Japan, Mitsubishi sold a mere 140,000 units in 2012, nearly a tenth of them imported. Mitsubishi needs scale and has a lot of capacity.Mitsubishi has been cooperating with Renault’s alliance partner Nissan for a long time, and has recently intensified the cooperation. Nissan and Renault are so intermeshed that for all intents and purposes, there already is some kind of an alliance between Renault and Mitsubishi, the loose, working level kind, the kind Carlos Ghosn prefers over the blunt takeover so popular among Renault’s Germanic neighbors. In a recent talk to French students, Ghosn said that “cross-cultural relations are one of our core competencies.”Mitsubishi is looking back at a series of failed marriages and romances, one of them with Renault’s French peer PSA, only months after they were thought to have tied the knot.Renault and Nissan want to expand aggressively into the emerging markets. Mitsubishi shares that goal. Development of platforms and technologies is expensive, and you need to spread that investment over many units. Over A LOT OF UNITS if they are low cost, targeted at cash poor markets. Then, those many units need to be made.“We would be nuts if we invest a lot of money into new plants if there’s so much idle capacity sitting around,” muses a friend who works at a French car company that starts with an “R.” The friend thinks that no immediate announcements will come in respect to the story, but he recommends to keep monitoring the French-Japonaise romance.Meanwhile, a Renault spokeswoman told Reuters on the record: “We had discussions with Mitsubishi in the past on limited cooperation as we have done with other automakers, but they didn’t result in an agreement. We have nothing new at this stage.”(Due to a recent outbreak of prudery among some readers and writers of these annals, we refrain from illustrating this story with the customary tie-up pictures , although there are good ones. We will save them for a more festive occasion.)