Nissan has started to make positive financial moves after facing a dire outlook earlier this year, but it has had to sell its home to do so.
As reported by Bloomberg, Nissan has agreed to sell its global headquarters, located in Yokohama, to a Taiwanese company backed by a car parts firm, with the deal reportedly worth ¥97 billion ($963 million).
That figure is down slightly on the estimated ¥100 billion ($993 million) value placed on the facility by Japanese publication Nikkei when reports of the potential sale first emerged in May.
Nissan will remain a tenant of the site, announcing it “will enter into a 20-year leaseback agreement, ensuring no impact on employees or operations and reaffirming the company’s long-term commitment to Yokohama”, while allowing the profits of the sale to be reinvested internally.
The site was built relatively recently in the late 2000s when Nissan relocated from Tokyo to Yokohama, under Nissan’s leadership of then-CEO and now-wanted fugitive, Carlos Ghosn.
Its decision to sell the site was made amidst significant financial hardship, with Nissan earlier this year announcing net loss of ¥670.9 billion (A$7.1 billion) throughout the 2024 Japanese financial year (April 2024 to March 2025), a staggering loss of ¥1.097 trillion (A$11.5 billion) compared to the financial year prior.
The news of the sale comes as Nissan announced a quarterly operating profit of ¥51.5 billion ($511 million) between July and September, its best quarter since the end of the 2023 financial year.
According to Nissan, the brand expects to break even in operating profits this year, excluding the impact of the US tariffs, which are estimated to lead to an operating loss of ¥275 billion ($2.73 billion).
Year-to-date in Australia, Nissan has delivered 31,050 vehicles between January and October, down 17.7 per cent on the same period last year. All models aside from the low-selling Pathfinder are experiencing a sales drop.
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