The “Re:Nissan” rebuild: seven plants consolidated, 20,000 jobs cut (2025)

The entrance to a rebuild that does not chase scale

The core of this rebuild is that Nissan finally reached into the excess production capacity it had long carried, this time including its main home-country sites. In the 1990s it pushed into closing domestic plants at Zama and Murayama too, but those stayed within the frame of holding to a full lineup and depending on the keiretsu. Consolidating seven plants including Oppama and cutting twenty thousand jobs was an attempt to recast the old thinking — keeping capacity in order to secure volume — into profit that does not lean on volume. The disappearance of the merger with Honda, closing the path to making up scale from outside, can be seen as having pushed this decision to cut into its own flesh alone.

Even so, cutting capacity alone does not make a rebuild succeed. The ¥20 billion net profit projected for the year ending March 2027 is a thin one, with cost cuts working first; if sales do not pick up in North America and China, it could fall into a shrinking equilibrium in which falling revenue and thinning profit advance together. What Nissan will sell and earn from, once it has cut plants and people, is a product-and-market answer that has not yet become numbers. The history of capacity cuts running from Zama to Oppama teaches that painful reorganization may be the entrance to a rebuild, but by itself is not the exit. Whether Nissan’s rebuild becomes real will be decided by the move it makes after the cutting.