Alexey Kardo comments

@robert maes

of course competent people can forecast outcome in advance.

somebody was covering their asses (“saving face” they call it).

well, they were at a $6 billion loss in 1999.

it took Ghosn only a year to get the company back to profit. And in 3 years Nissan started making 500M yen net income, and kept making it for almost 15 years.

https://i.ibb.co/5h5DBMBQ/Screenshot-1187.png

@nishikat I absolutely agree, there are many good managers in the industry and around (though there are probably only few great ones who turned failing companies around, and Ghosn is definitely among them).

The magic happens because of a combination of factors:

great manager,

great trust and rights delegated to him by investors - including their wisdom not to intervene in the process and ruin efficiency with bureaucracy

good enough resources available to the manager

long enough time for changes to start working (though with Nissan of 1999, Ghosn didn't even need that to make it profitable - tool him just 1 year; but still it took 14 years more to grow it from 2.4 to over 5.2 million cars sold annually)

It seems Nissan owners / decision makers can provide only 1 or 2 of these four:(

With Ghosn+Renault, all 4 factors coincided in one place and time.

Might be not easy to replicate.

Former 10 years of Nissan's management 1990-1998: all years but two with losses, over 10 billion lost, including staggering 6 billion in 1999

https://i.ibb.co/0pZCcrTz/Screenshot-1188.png

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Majid-A-Dehkordi/publication/353143497/figure/fig17/AS:1043978296234006@1625915230715/Nissans-annual-Net-income-and-loss-in-billions-Yen-Nissan-annual-reports-1996-1999.ppm

@rainyday

Every man is innocent until proven guilty.

We can still appreciate results already

Mishandling a case for millions at a super successful company at the cost of losing the company and hundreds of billions is sheer idiocy.

It should’ve been handled responsibly — by owners overseeing 130K employees, banks owed $50B, investors with $30B at stake, and the government benefiting from Nissan’s profits and taxes.

They could talk, they could negotiate, they could run it over with Renault (and they had too, if they respected them as investors and co-owners). They could handle their company gently.

Instead, they burned the house, everything down over a “scratched door.” Ghosn doubled sales, earned about $50 billions for shareholders, and fueled Japan’s economy. Now, Nissan is on the brink:

— 130,000 jobs at risk

— Banks may lose $50B

— Investors lost $20B in value

— probably another $50B in profit could be earned in the next 10 years with Ghosn, as he had been doing in 2000-2018.

— The government may have to clean up the mess

“Bad” Ghosn brought prosperity.

The “good” managers ran everything into the ground. This disaster isn’t on him.