Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi

The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance is a strategic partnership between Renault and Nissan. Renault-Nissan owns a controlling stake in the joint venture, which is the majority shareholder of AvtoVAZ.

Performance indicators

2023: 5th largest car sales in the world

2022: Internet-Connected Cars Market Share - 6.3%

Source: Counterpoint Global Connected Car Tracker
Based on Q1 2019 to Q4 2022 data

2020: Global Automotive Market Share - 9.3%

Renault - Nissan - Mitsubishi's share of the global car market was 9.3% (Nikkei data). Read more here.

History

2023: AvtoVAZ bought Renault-Nissan bank

On June 21, 2023, AvtoVAZ announced the purchase of 100% of RN Bank (the Russian bank of the Renault-Nissan alliance) from BARN B.V. The deal is closed, its financial and other conditions are not disclosed. Read more here.

2022: €23bn electrification plan

On January 27, 2022, Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi presented a joint electrification plan worth 23 billion euros ($26 billion), in which the struggling automobile alliance is trying to prove that it is still a force to be reckoned with.

The plan calls for 35 new battery-powered vehicles on five common production platforms by the end of the decade. It relies on burden sharing in the development of new technologies such as next-generation batteries, automated driving features and software.

"This is a huge investment that none of the three companies could have made alone," said Renault chairman Jean-Dominique Senard. He told reporters and analysts that the plan makes ties between the companies "absolutely inextricable."

2020: Alliance expands co-production

In May 2020, it was announced that the Japanese-French alliance Renault - Nissan - Mitsubishi intends to produce about 50% of the models that will be jointly developed and produced by 2025.

As Renault Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard, who is also co-chairman of the board of directors of the union of three firms, emphasized, now "the new model of the alliance's activities is more aimed at increasing competitiveness than at production volumes."

Senar said that the leadership of the alliance decided to significantly expand the use of the existing scheme for creating and producing machines based on the base model. Since 2019, the alliance has already produced 30% of its products using basic platforms. These are mainly utilitarian models.

Each company will focus on activities in its designated "reference region."

• Nissan will take the lead in Japan, China and North America.
• Renault allocated activities in Europe, Russia, South America and North Africa
• Mitsubishi will lead in Southeast Asia and Oceania.

2019

Within the alliance, Renault owned 43.4 shares of Nissan, and the Japanese company - 15 percent of Renault shares. At the same time, the cooperation of companies was not regulated by any documents binding on both parties. Instead, the leaders of the French and Japanese parts, as he writes in December 2019, WSJ regularly "discussed joint actions." One of the principles of the alliance was that no one could force media cooperation^[1] to^[2]

For 20 years of the alliance's existence, Renault and Nissan had practically no "common" models. In some cases, the case was limited to "re-tag," as, for example, with the Dacia Duster, which is sold in different markets both under its own name and under the name Renault Duster or Nissan Terrano.

Even in cases where companies conducted joint developments, trust between partners was not already at the level of engineers. For all twenty years, writes WSJ, Nissan and Renault "constantly bickered," accusing each other of constant delays, then of trying to get rid of someone else's technology, then simply of unwillingness to cooperate and make compromises. "The month did not pass without conflicts," the publication quotes one of the former leaders.

Of particular surprise to the Wall Street Journal is that despite the release by both companies of the most massive and successful electric vehicles Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe, these cars have almost no common parts. Although it would be more logical if alliance partners created a common platform or at least shared technology. Only in 2019, both companies announced that they were busy jointly developing an electric car, which will appear "in the coming years," although this should have been done back in 2010, when the Leaf was launched.

Notes