A beaming and relaxed Carlos Ghosn dispensed a little insider knowledge tonight in Tokyo and let (surely not involuntarily) slip that there will be “significantly higher numbers tomorrow” when Nissan announces its predictions for the current fiscal year.
“Tomorrow, the company officially will put the forecast for the fiscal year 2011. When I announced the financial results in May, we said that our sales in 2011 will probably be higher than in 2010. Everybody was stunned and said I am very optimistic. Well, we are going to show you the numbers tomorrow, and they will be significantly higher than in 2010.”
Interviewed by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia at the Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event at the spiffy Reuters Tokyo bureau, Ghosn predicted 2011 to become “record year of sales and total volume produced for the industry.”
Recession you say? Ghosn doesn’t believe in a double dip recession.
“The recovery will not happen in a linear fashion. We will have two steps forward, one step sideways, two steps behind, three steps forward – it will be a bit chaotic before we come back to growth. We are seeing crab movements, and we will do this until there is a clear recovery. My fundamental feeling is we are not going to a double dip. However, we are not on this boulevard of growth everybody is hoping for.”
From what we currently have, it appears as if Nissan is escaping the March tsunami far less affected than Toyota or Honda. Nissan has a smaller percentage of production in Japan and is growing faster in emerging markets.
We were not allowed to take pictures during the event, such as not to steal the thunder from the video, which is available in full length on YouTube. To prove that the story wasn’t researched using YouTube, I enter the picture above into evidence. The guy in the blue shirt, front row, left side of the aisle is me. It just looks like I’m kissing Ghosn’s derriere.
