NISSAN BETS BIG ON SMALL

摘要

Drive through Tokyo these days and you see them everywhere: zippy little automobiles that look like bumper cars for grown-ups. Quirky subcompacts such as Toyota Motor Corp.'s pod-shaped Vitz and Honda Motor Co.'s insect-like Fit are huge hits in Japan, providing a rare piece of good news for an industry that will sell 0.7% fewer vehicles at home this year than last. So where has Nissan Motor Co. been while Toyota and Honda were cleaning up with the Vitz and Fit? Carlos Ghosn, the former Renault executive who now runs Nissan, ruefully explains: "This is a segment where we didn't renew our [lineup] as quickly as we should have." Now Nissan has a chance to make up for that oversight. This month, Japan's No. 3 carmaker unveils its answer to the Fit and the Vitz: the March, the first Nissan car to share a platform with Renault, which owns a controlling stake in the Japanese auto maker. Nissan hopes the new car, a reworking of a 10-year-old design, will help the company reverse a perilous decade of sliding sales in Japan. For while Ghosn has pushed Nissan through a brutal restructuring that made the carmaker profitable again―it expects to announce record earnings for fiscal 2001, the second year in a row― Nissan still hasn't reconnected with Japanese drivers. That's despite the launch of a half-dozen new models in the past 18 months. "Nissan can't rely on restructuring forever," says Koji Endo, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in Tokyo. "There's no question it can't afford to fail with this model."