After Renault, Nissan will also sell shares in Daimler

According to foreign media reports, following the sale of Daimler shares by alliance partner Renault in March, Nissan now also said that it is passing an accelerated transaction to sell 1.5% of Daimler’s shares.

According to a statement issued by Nissan on May 4, Nissan will sell its shares to institutional investors at the end of June at a price of 69.85 euros per share. It is expected that the company will receive approximately 1.15 billion euros (about 1.38 billion US dollars). Income. These proceeds will be invested in areas such as electric vehicles.

Earlier this year, Daimler and Renault said that the cooperation is still going on. However, people familiar with the matter revealed that the large-scale preliminary plan has never been finalized and cross-shareholding is no longer necessary. Daimler said that it will not comment on third-party transactions, and its alliance partnership has not changed. Daimler has not announced any plans for the shares of Nissan and Renault.

The business and capital cooperation between Nissan-Renault-Daimler began in 2010. It was led by Carlos Ghosn, who also led Renault, and Dimler, who was chairman and CEO of Daimler before 2019. Dieter Zetsche developed. At that time, Nissan and Renault acquired a total of 3.1% of Daimler's shares; Daimler also held 3.1% of shares in Nissan and Renault, respectively. After the global economic crisis in 2008 burdened car companies with excessive employees, equipment and debts, Ghosn believed that teaming up with peers was a way to deal with the crisis. He hoped that such cooperation could reduce Ru0026D and production costs, increase profits, and enable cooperation. Partners improve their competitiveness with companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen and BMW.

In a speech with Zetsche at the 2015 Frankfurt International Auto Show, Ghosn praised the 13 joint projects of the Renault-Nissan alliance and Daimler, saying that the alliance of the three companies is 'the most important in the automotive industry.' One of fruitful cooperation'. However, the effectiveness of these projects remains to be discussed.

In 2017, a joint venture plant of three car companies in Mexico (one of their most famous joint ventures) started production to produce compact cars under the luxury brands Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz. However, sales of small cars in the United States are sluggish, making the plant's annual output well below its annual production capacity of 230,000 vehicles. According to data from the research company MarkLines, the plant produced 90,000 cars in 2019 and 106,000 last year.

In 2014, Nissan began to use Daimler engines in its flagship model Skyline, but later switched to Japanese engines. After Ghosn was arrested and Zetsche stepped down, the cooperation between Nissan and Daimler further stalled. As cooperation loses momentum, cross-shareholding becomes meaningless.