Unlock the publisher’s digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Nissan began to seek a strategic partner in the technology industry after its managing director Makoto Uchida told his counterpart Honda that he put an end to the merger talks to create the fourth car manufacturer in the world.
The search for new partners would be wide and outside the automotive industry, according to two people with direct knowledge of the issue.
Some members of the board of directors are also open to considering a partnership with the manufacturer of Taiwanese iPhone contracts Foxconn. The apple supplier approached Alliance Renault’s partner with regard to the acquisition of part of his participation in Nissan at the end of last year, triggering the frantic but ephemeral cycle of the merger with Honda.
On Thursday morning, Uchida met Honda Toshihiro Mibe’s chief to inform him of the council’s intention to dissolve the talks announced in December to combine as a business with a market capitalization of around 58 billion dollars, according to people familiar with the issue.
The talks collapsed after Honda demanded the weekend that Nissan accepts a new offer to become a fully owned subsidiary, deviating from the initially agreed structure of a joint portfolio company.
Wednesday, the meeting of the Board of Directors of Nissan decided that it would leave the merger talks because Honda had told them that the new offer was “to take it or leave it”, that they could not accept for fear of losing Decision -making power and that their brand is weakening under Honda Gestion.
Nissan and Honda refused to comment. The two companies should publish profits next Thursday, when they should publicly announce that the talks have ended and explain why.
After launching official discussions with Honda, discussions quickly fell into a bitter fight, Honda accusing Nissan of moving too slowly on her restructuring plan and Nissan saying that Honda’s new offer blinded her.
Analysts were skeptical about the union from the start due to the Gulf in their corporate cultures – Nissan proud of his engineering talent and Honda with a long record of rider alone.
Renault, France, had unloaded its 36% participation in Nissan following a restructuring of their 25 -year alliance in 2023.
The collapse of buyout talks leaves the door open to Foxconn to revive its ambitions to take the participation of Renault in Nissan as a platform to extend its unit of electric vehicles.
Jun Seki, director of the Foxconn EV Division for the EV division, knows Nissan well after being in the past three number of three until the end of 2019.
