The Renault-Nissan alliance was a utopia that faded away
Stéphane Lauer
COLUMN. The two companies have reached an agreement in which the French carmaker relinquishes control over the Japanese company without any real compensation, writes Le Monde columnist Stéphane Lauer.
/en/bucket/assets/9abde188d173336fab13ba96d22acb5c316be9a8/img/logos/favicon.ico
Le Monde.fr
In London on Monday, February 6, Jean-Dominique Senard and Luca De Meo, the president and chief executive of French car maker Renault, were tasked with a near-impossible feat: Transform what looked like a death certificate into a birth announcement. The Renault-Nissan Alliance is dead, long live Renault, long live Nissan!

Following months of rumors and drama, the two companies reached an agreement by which Renault will simply give up control of Nissan without any real compensation. It will own 15% of Nissan, down from 43% previously. The Japanese on the other hand will finally be granted voting rights for the 15% they already hold in Renault.

Read more Subscribers only Renault and Nissan sign near-divorce

This new "15-15" figure, supposed to bring harmony back among two groups that have not been able to work together for years, marks the end of an adventure that began 24 years ago. The deal was a bi-national alliance and purported to be the antithesis of a brutal merger. It was based on mutual respect and the preservation of individual cultures. It was a beautiful utopia that initially seemed to deliver but then slowly faded away.

Ad-hoc cooperation

As is the case in separations, the divorced parties are trying to save face by pretending that ties remain. After all, 24 years of living together cannot be erased with the stroke of a pen.

This was the purpose of Monday's announcements, a handful of one-off ventures that are commonplace in the automotive sector and no longer have anything to do with the original idea of the alliance.

These initiatives only underlined that the two groups no longer have much to share, except for marginal opportunities involving small production volumes and peripheral markets.

Although Europe is no longer seen as a priority for Nissan, the Japanese car maker came to the conclusion it made sense to entrust the assembly of its small city car, the Micra, to the Renault plant in Douai, northern France.

Launching a pick-up in South America was an old project that Renault could not carry out alone, hence Nissan's idea of resurrecting it to keep its industrial activity in Argentina afloat. As for India, the alliance never managed to break into this market. Rather than opting for a complicated, and costly withdrawal, Nissan chose to contain the damage by relying on Renault's know-how in low-cost vehicles while waiting for better times.

Finally, the project to relabel Renault cars (Capture and Clio) in Europe with a Mitsubishi logo (Mitsubishi joined the Franco-Japanese alliance at a later stage) is a solution that the alliance had always put aside considering that the models would cannibalize each other with no obvious gain for either party.