Nissan bosses believe car market will pick up despite £1.58bn loss

May 13 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

Mr Ghosn said: “2009 will be another challenging year. Our priorities will be preserving cash, improving our profitability and pursuing deeper synergies within the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

“We are balancing short and long-term objectives to manage through the crisis and to prepare for the future.” The group expects sales to dip to 3.08 million cars this year but is pushing ahead with the launch of eight new models. It also expects the UK’s scrappage scheme, which gives buyers money off new cars if they scrap models at least 10 years old, to drive up demand.

The success of similar schemes on the Continent boosted Nissan’s sales by 31% in France last month, by 21% in Italy and 9% in Germany.

The temporary jobs being created in Sunderland from June will be four-month contracts to make around 14,000 extra cars to meet this extra demand.

But Professor Garel Rhys, the recently retired director of the Centre for Automotive Industry research at Cardiff Business School, said it would be a long time before the car industry returned to the “heady days of 2007”.

“The car market in Europe, Britain and indeed the world is not going to start to recover until at least 2011,” he said.

“I think they are being a little optimistic. We haven’t seen the worst in the car market. All the vehicle makers know that.”