Makoto Uchida
| Makoto Uchida | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 July 1966 Tokyo, Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Education | Doshisha University (Faculty of Theology, graduated 1991) |
| Occupation | Business executive |
| Employer | Nissan Motor Corporation (2003 to 2025, with a break) |
| Title | Former President and Representative Executive Officer, CEO of Nissan Motor Corporation |
| Known for | Leading the "NISSAN NEXT" restructuring plan; presiding over the collapsed merger talks with Honda |
Makoto Uchida (内田誠, born 20 July 1966) is a Japanese business executive. He served as President, Representative Executive Officer and Chief Executive Officer of Nissan Motor Corporation from 1 December 2019 until his resignation in March 2025.
Uchida took the top job at a moment of severe disruption inside the company, following the arrest of former chairman Carlos Ghosn and the resignation of his immediate predecessor over an improper compensation scandal. His tenure encompassed the COVID-19 pandemic, a record annual loss, a multi-year restructuring programme, and finally an attempted merger with Honda that broke down shortly before he left office.
Early life and education
Uchida was born in Tokyo on 20 July 1966. Because of his father's work, he spent much of his childhood abroad: from first through fifth grade he lived in Cairo, Egypt, and from the second year of middle school through the second year of high school he lived in Malaysia. While in Malaysia, Uchida used money he earned from a part-time job to buy a used motocross bike. After returning to Japan, he enrolled at Doshisha International High School, a school that accepted children returning from overseas postings, and in March 1991 he graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in theology. Uchida has said he wanted "dynamic work with the world," and by his own account this ambition, rather than a specific interest in the auto industry, shaped his early career choices. He speaks fluent English in addition to his native Japanese.
Career
Nissho Iwai, 1991 to 2003
Uchida joined Nissho Iwai (now Sojitz), a Tokyo-based general trading company, in April 1991, immediately after graduating. He was first assigned to the machinery division before moving into the automobile division, and he spent five years posted to the Philippines, where he worked at a joint venture that Nissho Iwai had established with Mitsubishi Motors.
First spell at Nissan and Renault Samsung, 2003 to 2014
Uchida moved to Nissan of his own accord in October 2003, not through headhunting. He later said he wanted "to do something more global," and that if he changed jobs again he wanted it to be in the auto industry; at the time Uchida saw the company as "a globally diverse company." Uchida began in purchasing at the company's Atsugi Technical Center and was named a manager in October 2006 within the Renault-Nissan Purchasing Organization. In September 2012 Uchida left for Renault Samsung Motors in South Korea, where he stayed for less than two years. There he led a project exporting X-Trail vehicles built at Renault's Korean plant to the North American market, cutting costs and improving profitability sharply enough that colleagues later called it one of the success stories of the alliance. Uchida rejoined the company as a Program Director in April 2014.
Rise to the top job, 2016 to 2019
Uchida's senior executive career began in November 2016, when he was named Corporate Vice President in charge of Alliance Purchasing. In April 2018 Uchida was promoted to Senior Vice President and named president of Dongfeng Motor Corporation, and in April 2019 he also became chairman of the company's Management Committee for China. In October 2019, a six-member nominating committee that included outside directors considered several internal candidates for the chief executive role; the committee was initially split, with a majority favouring Jun Seki, a smaller group backing Mitsubishi Motors executive Ashwani Gupta, and one member supporting interim chief Yasuhiro Yamauchi. According to the dossier's Japanese-language source, Renault chairman Jean-Dominique Senard intervened in favour of Uchida after the committee had begun to settle on Seki, and Uchida was chosen unanimously by the board. Uchida took office as the company's chief executive on 1 December 2019, with Seki becoming deputy chief operating officer and Gupta serving as chief operating officer, a three-way leadership structure that was described inside the company as a "troika."
CEO of Nissan, 2019 to 2025
Uchida's tenure began amid turmoil. Ghosn's arrest and the resignation of predecessor Hiroto Saikawa over an improper compensation scheme had already weakened the company's management and brand, and performance was poor. Shortly after Uchida took office, Seki abruptly resigned to join Nidec, collapsing the troika structure, and a number of other senior executives left for rival companies.
The COVID-19 pandemic then struck. With the company's performance already weak, worldwide restrictions on movement further depressed vehicle sales, and on 28 May 2020 the company reported results for the 2019 financial year showing a loss of 671.2 billion yen, its largest in 27 years. In response, Uchida announced a restructuring programme called "NISSAN NEXT." Its elements included cutting production capacity by 20 per cent to an annual 5.4 million vehicles; closing plants in Barcelona and Indonesia while keeping other plants above 80 per cent utilisation; reducing the model lineup by 20 per cent by the 2023 financial year; shortening model life cycles to under four years; concentrating on C- and D-segment vehicles, electric vehicles and sports cars; cutting fixed costs by 300 billion yen against the 2018 financial year baseline; focusing on the core markets of Japan, North America, Europe and China; and launching twelve new models within eighteen months, including the Rogue, Note, Frontier, Ariya and Z. The Indonesian plant closed by May 2020. The Barcelona closure was delayed to the end of 2021 after opposition from the plant's labour union, and in October 2021 Uchida's management began negotiating the sale of the Barcelona site to China's Great Wall Motors. In July 2020 the company unveiled a new corporate identity and logo, its first redesign in 19 years, under Uchida's direction.
Under Uchida, the company pushed the new-model programme, beginning with the Rogue in June 2020 and continuing with new versions of the Navara and Note, among others; Uchida personally drove a prototype Z on the company's test track shortly after the car's unveiling. The 2020 financial year still showed lower revenue and profit because of the pandemic, but Uchida's company achieved more than 300 billion yen in cost reductions as planned. By the first quarter of the 2021 financial year, the company returned to profit for the first time in three years, and it remained profitable through the first half of that year. In February 2020 Uchida had also joined the company's board of directors, in addition to his roles as Representative Executive Officer and CEO, and in November 2021 he became vice chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.
From 2024, weak North American sales and other pressures caused the company's performance to deteriorate again, and it forecast a consolidated net loss of 80 billion yen for the financial year ending March 2025. Starting in December 2024, Uchida's company held talks with Honda over a possible management integration, but the negotiations ultimately collapsed. Amid the resulting turmoil, Uchida signalled that he intended to resign early. He stepped down as President and CEO in March 2025 and was succeeded by Ivan Espinosa on 1 April 2025. Uchida remained a director of the company until he retired from the board in June 2025. In July 2025, after Uchida's departure, the company announced the end of production at its Oppama plant; it also became known that Uchida had received retirement pay of 646 million yen.
Personal life
Uchida has described himself as someone who loves cars: he has serviced and painted vehicles himself and has taken cars through Japan's owner-administered inspection process rather than relying on a dealer. His first car, bought while he worked at Nissho Iwai, was a manual-transmission Z32-generation Fairlady Z, and Uchida has said that "Nissan cars are genuinely exciting" and that "a sports car is part of your body." When the company unveiled the Z prototype in 2020, photographs circulated of Uchida with his own Fairlady Z. Uchida has traced his interest in cars to the manga "Circuit no Ōkami" ("Wolf of the Circuit"), which he read avidly at a friend's house in Cairo as an elementary school pupil, and to a used motocross bike he bought with part-time earnings while at school in Malaysia. After joining the company, Uchida gave up a large-displacement imported car he had owned during his trading-company years in favour of a March. At the time the dossier describes, he was driving a first-generation Leaf that he had bought before his posting to China.
Assessment
Uchida's tenure produced a genuine, board-endorsed rescue plan and, for a period, measurable results: NISSAN NEXT delivered the cost cuts it promised, and the company returned to profitability within about eighteen months of the plan's announcement, despite the pandemic. Uchida was also credited internally, during his earlier posting to Korea, with turning around a loss-making export project, which was one of the reasons he was chosen for the top job.
Against this, annual sales at Uchida's company fell from a peak of 5.79 million vehicles in the 2017 financial year to 3.34 million in the 2024 financial year, a decline of more than 40 per cent during a period that was substantially under his leadership. Group headcount, meanwhile, stayed close to 130,000 from 2017 through 2023, so the sales decline was not matched by a comparable reduction in the workforce. The "Turnaround" plan Uchida announced in November 2024, cutting 9,000 jobs and 20 per cent of production capacity, relied mainly on consolidating production lines, adjusting shifts and reassigning staff rather than closing plants, and market observers criticised it as insufficient in both scale and substance; plant utilisation fell to around 60 per cent. When Honda subsequently sought a merger that would have required deep management cuts and a consolidation of plants and production lines, Uchida's rebuilding proposal was seen, according to the dossier's Japanese-language source, as little more than an extension of the already-criticised Turnaround plan. Honda concluded that Uchida's company could not rebuild itself on its own and requested sweeping changes to its management as a condition of the deal, including that it become a subsidiary; the board, under Uchida, refused, and the talks collapsed entirely. After Uchida's departure, his successor moved quickly on cost cuts, and former executives of the company were quoted saying that the necessary surgery had come "far too late" and asking why such changes had not been made under Uchida's own leadership.