(CEO Makoto Uchida)

Thank you for joining us today.

To begin with, I would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the healthcare workers around the world who are on the frontlines of battling COVID-19.

Nissan continues to place the highest priority on the safety of everyone we work with and serve, including our customers, dealers, suppliers, employees, and their families. We are doing our utmost to prevent infections while running our operations.

The fiscal year 2020 was a year of big changes dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and impacted by multiple factors including the growth of environmental awareness and political and economic changes.

Despite the challenges, Nissan has been making steady progress in implementing Nissan NEXT business transformation plan, which we announced last May.

As I said in February, we are seeing encouraging results thanks to our employees who are doing their utmost every day to bring Nissan back despite the challenging climate, and all our business partners who are working with us to overcome the difficulties. I would like to express my sincere appreciation for your strong support and contribution.

Our COO Ashwani Gupta will cover the full-year performance for the fiscal year 2020, and I will present the outlook for the fiscal year 2021.

Ashwani-san, over to you.

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(COO Ashwani Gupta)

Thank you Uchida-san. Good afternoon everyone.

This year has been indeed an evolutionary journey for Nissan and a true test of our resilience and agility. Amidst all the uncertainty, we have been clocking regular progress thanks to the hard work of our employees and partners who are relentlessly driving forward our Nissan's business transformation.

Let me now go over the fiscal year 2020 performance and the progress of Nissan NEXT.

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First, as you can see on the left graph, our global retail sales for fiscal year 2020 is 4.052 Million which is 0.9% ahead of our sales volume forecast.

Second, quarter by quarter, we continued to adopt to the new normal and have been meeting the growing needs of our customers.

Third, through the end of the fourth quarter, Nissan has achieved sales growth ahead of average industry volumes, underscoring the importance of our recovery efforts. Despite many headwinds (pandemic, supply chain constraints including semiconductor shortage etc), in the fourth quarter, our sales grew by 18% with respect to market growth of 2%.

This growth was fuelled both by the performance of our current models and the newly launched ones including all new Rogue in the U.S., all new Note in Japan, all new Magnite in India and others. With regards to current models, we saw an increase in segment share for models like Juke in Europe and Sylphy in China.

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To recap, last year we began our four-year Nissan NEXT business transformation plan based on three pillars:

  1. Rationalization: focused on reducing our fixed costs in line with our sales potential from 7.2 Million to 5.4 Million
  2. Prioritization and Focus: on core markets with core products and technologies to strengthen Quality of Sales by shifting from "Volume to Value"
  3. Growth: plan and prepare new products and technologies to drive growth during and beyond Nissan NEXT

Through fiscal year 2020, Nissan made steady progress. We were able to balance our immediate performance recovery efforts with foundational elements to bridge to the future.

Now, let me go through each pillar.

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First, rationalization.

Over the course of the year, Nissan has undertaken several key initiatives to reduce fixed costs across our operations, leading to a significant overall reduction. We are optimizing production capacity, decided to close two plants and moving from three to two shifts across our manufacturing facilities, thereby reducing costs by 7%. With a clear focus on customer value, we decided to streamline our product portfolio, from 69 to 55 models by the end of fiscal year 2023.

In fiscal year 2020, the plan is on track, bringing product related costs down by 5%.

For marketing and sales, Nissan has made significant progress, reducing cost by 27% as we strategically allocated budgets toward a more focused, impactful mixture of marketing, sponsorships and motor shows. Our enhanced efforts in digital sales experience resulted in 12% of our global sales coming through customer digital journey.

To optimize General and Administrative costs, we made some radical decisions.

From consolidation of 7 diversified regions to 4 equivalent regions (Americas, Japan- ASEAN, AMIEO and China) to efficient management of assets and facilities, these efforts led to an 11% reduction of G&A costs during fiscal year 2020.

Altogether, we have delivered over 350 billion yen in cost reductions, exceeding our objectives of 300 billion yen reduction versus fiscal year 2018.

With this fixed cost reduction, we were able to bring down operating profit breakeven sales volume by 12%. In fiscal year 2018, our breakeven volume was approximately 5 million units but now, we can start generating profit with approximately 4.4 million units. This reinforces our strategy to pull profitable growth by value.

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Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. published this content on 21 May 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 24 May 2021 07:46:07 UTC.