Nissan Posts Predictable Quarterly Loss, Says Annual Losses Won't Be Too Bad

Despite predicting a rough year for itself long before the pandemic kicked the whole industry in the shins, Nissan is reporting a sunnier financial forecast. Thanks to its vast restructuring efforts and better-than-anticipated sales, the Japanese automaker has trimmed estimated annual operating losses by 28 percent.

According to Nissan, that should place the 2020 cash bleed (which doesn’t officially wrap until March 31st, 2021) somewhere around $3.2 billion instead of the original $4.5 billion. Considering it’s coming off an already bad year, this is actually good news. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t more hard times ahead, as Nissan has decided to evolve its restructuring plan to make sure it doesn’t lose more money than absolutely necessary.

Translated from yen, the July-September quarter saw the firm reporting an operating loss of $45.6 million. This time last year Nissan was making $285 million but the pandemic lockdowns likely made anything approaching that an impossibility in 2020. Sales declined by 27 percent, year-over-year.

CEO Makoto Uchida said the company could expedite its recovery phase by bolstering its restructuring efforts and said he expected Nissan to return to profitability sometime in 2021. While great news for shareholders, this means the 12,500 job cuts announced in 2019 are now 14,000 strong.

The company also seems poised to pull out of the European market (leaving it to Renault) while it focuses on improving sales in China and the United States. This comes while it’s also hoping to freshen the lineup with a dozen new models — though some are just heavy refreshes — and lower incentive spending. During Thursday’s presser, COO Ashwani Gupta also noted that the company was interested in embracing a global online sales model. COVID-19 hasn’t been particularly kind to retailers and the industry seems keen to get dealers out of the picture so it can start charging consumers a haggle-free price that’s probably closer to sticker than invoice.

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