Renault-Nissan plan to develop, build cars with Mitsubishi Motors

By Yoko Kubota

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Renault-Nissan alliance and Mitsubishi Motors Corp are planning to cooperate in building Mitsubishi-badged cars at a Renault plant and jointly develop small cars including electric vehicles, the carmakers said.

The announcement on Tuesday came a day before Mitsubishi Motors, one of the only second-tier Japanese carmakers without a major alliance with another global automaker, is set to announce its mid-term plan that is expected to show how it will repay its decade-old bailout.

The three carmakers are not in talks for a capital alliance, Nissan Motor Co and Mitsubishi spokesmen said.

Mitsubishi Motors, which attempted a tie-up with DaimlerChrysler that ended a decade ago without concrete results, is considering selling two new Mitsubishi-badged sedans that will be based on Renault vehicles, the companies said in a statement.

One of them, a full-size D-segment sedan, will be manufactured at the Renault-Samsung plant in Busan, South Korea and be sold in the United States and Canada, the companies said.

South Korea and the United States are free-trade partners, which plan to phase out tariffs on vehicles made in South Korea to be exported to the United States.

The companies said the production location of the second sedan is under discussion.

Nissan, which sells the all-electric Leaf, and Mitsubishi, which has been selling the i-MiEV electric minicar since 2009, will likely develop together a new small car including an electric vehicle that would be sold globally, they said.

Nissan and Mitsubishi are considering combining Nissan’s lithium-ion battery and Mitsubishi’s motor technologies in jointly developing the electric vehicle, Nissan spokeswoman Noriko Yoneyama said.

Nissan and Renault are both seeing sluggish performance. Nissan, Japan’s second-biggest carmaker by sales volume, was one of the worst performers among Japanese carmakers in July-September, showing a meagre 2 percent year-on-year net profit growth, while Renault saw third-quarter revenue drop 3.2 percent.

Renault holds a 43.4 percent stake in Nissan, while Nissan holds a 15 percent stake in the French carmaker.

Nissan shares closed down 10.4 percent ahead of the news, after the company announced its July-September results and an executive reshuffle on Friday. Mitsubishi shares closed down 4 percent, underperforming the Nikkei index that rose 0.2 percent.

Renault shares were down 2 percent as of 0827 GMT.

(Additional reporting by Kentaro Sugiyama and Chang-ran Kim; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

Renault-Nissan plan to develop, build cars with Mitsubishi Motors