Renault-Nissan Alliance Forms Light Commercial Vehicle Business Unit

The Renault-Nissan Alliance has formed a light commercial vehicle business unit to strengthen its global presence in this growing segment.

The new division is meant to help the Renault-Nissan alliance to realize the full potential of Renault’s expertise in the van segment and Nissan’s leadership in trucks in major global markets. True to the spirit of the Alliance, the two brands will leverage complementary markets and products, all while retaining their own brand identity, sales and revenue.

Speaking about the new business unit, Alliance Chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn said that the new entity will combine the light commercial vehicle business of Renault, Nissan and have an early collaboration with Mitsubishi Motors into a single Alliance LCV Business Unit to boost sales and deliver greater synergies. Thus the alliance will be able to expand its market leadership by improving its performance in current and new, high-growth markets, based on each brand’s core products and market knowledge, while catering better to the needs of customers.

The Renault-Nissan LCV Business Unit will be led by Ashwani Gupta as Alliance senior vice president. Gupta will report to Carlos Ghosn.

The Unit will focus on maximizing cross-development and cross-manufacturing and is expected a lot of synergies when it comes to costs and technology. Over the past few years, Renault and Nissan have established cross-production of vans and trucks. One example of this is the Nissan NV300 van which is  built on the Renault Trafic platform. The Nissan NV400 van is built using the Renault Master platform. The Renault Alaskan pickup uses the Nissan Navara platform. The new Renault-Nissan LCV Business Unit will be dealing with Nissan’s body-on-frame SUVs, including the Nissan Armada and Nissan Patrol.

In 2016, Groupe Renault achieved sales of 443,931 LCVs globally, including Avtovaz, with the Kangoo, Master and Trafic emerging as the top seller models with sales of 118,200 units, 91,900 units and  81,600 units respectively. In the case of Nissan, the company sold 815,490 LCVs globally with the NP300 Navara, Frontier and NV200 being the bestsellers with sales of 196,257 units, 102,497 units and  54,118 units in 2016. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. sold 248,000 LCVs globally. The top-selling model in 2016 was Triton/L200 with 125,000 units.