Nissan Shifts into Higher Gear

Nissan Shifts into Higher Gear

Nissan Motors was going through a serious decline for the last decade due to poor management and strong competition of today. In addition, they were mostly concentrated on the older market population. Just when Nissan was close to failure, the new CEO, Carlos Ghosn had arrived to give the Nissan industry a promising future. In addition, the very active and determined Ghosn is promising to put Nissan in the top sixth ranks of automakers by 2005. Nissan applies strategies from Levitt, Minzberg and Greiner's articles to their business growth and their recent and future success. The following paragraphs will discuss further the main claims of the article "Nissan shifts into higher gear" by Alex Taylor III.

According to the article of Theodore Levitt "Marketing Myopia", the success or failure of a company depends on its management and not on the market saturation. If management defines its industry incorrectly, it will have a wrong orientation to the success of the company. Nowadays, one of the most common means of transportation is the automobile industry, which has many competitors. Therefore, each automotive company has to know how to stay on top. In the article of Alex Taylor III, "Nissan Shifts Into Higher Gear," (see Appendix A) it has stated that competition requires risk taking, in depth knowledge about the market demand, and constant innovation in order to succeed. Despite its massive production and saturated market, it still has room for improvements and possibilities for gaining bigger market share. This article examines some strategies that the CEO of Nissan Motors, Carlos Ghosn, uses to make the company with the highest operating margin of 10.8% in 2003. The author uses the development of the new minivan Quest 2004 as an example to describe the focus of Nissan's CEO towards the future of their company.

In order for a company to succeed, it is necessary to innovate products that are adaptable to customer's needs. In a highly competitive market, new designs have the importance of creating differentiation from others. Today, there are many choices of cars for buyers. Carlos Ghosn said "You don't build your character by doing what everybody else is doing." His statement is the reflection of the strategy that he uses to improve Nissan. Ghosn made several improvements to make Nissan a stronger team by taking risks at doing what the competition does not do and by innovating models that correspond