Despite cautious words from the world’s leaders about the economic outlook for 2012, many car firms have reported good results for 2011. Most recently, the Nissan-Renault partnership reported that sales of its vehicles rose by 10% in the previous year.
Renault, Nissan and their Russian partner AutoVaz increased sales from 7.28 million in 2010 to 8.03 million in 2011. The results were announced by Renault-Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn at the Detroit Motor Show.
Both the improvement in the US car market together with continued high demand in China were the reasons given for the good news.
As with other Japanese carmakers – mainly Honda and Toyota – Nissan was badly affected by the tsunami in Japan and flooding in Thailand. But unlike their two main native rivals, Nissan bounced back relatively quickly, still managing to sell 4.67 million vehicles in total. By the middle of May Nissan was able to get production back up to 80% of its capacity, with a full recovery by September.
As with several other carmakers around the world, Nissan and Renault will feel they avoided the commercial equivalent of a vehicle recovery operation in what has been a tumultuous year. Time will tell if 2012 will deliver them comparable success.
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