THE future’s very bright for Nissan but there are ‘growing pains’ ahead.
That’s the message from Managing Director Jim Wright, after the company announced its best-ever UK sales figures.
Just days after publishing record-breaking stats that saw new car sales rise sharply to 105,834 and the company’s share of the new car market hit 5.2 per cent, Wright took time to tell Insider of his vision for the road ahead.
The outlook is promising, he says, with a raft of new products set to strengthen the brand’s burgeoning consumer appeal. But capitalising on the opportunities for growth will require effort and investment at network level.
And the network must grow with the manufacturer if the impressive growth of recent years is to continue and the brand is to move to the next level.
Speaking at the Nissan Design Centre in London, Jim said: ‘We’ve had a great year in terms of volume, particularly if you look at where we’ve come from, but now, as we start the next wave of the product cycle, there’s a lot more work to be done.
‘Making the jump from four to five per cent market share is one thing, but going from five to six is something else altogether.
‘We have to make sure we have the right people, processes, systems and marketing plans in place to help us capture all the opportunities these cars will bring.’
He added: ‘The network I think has growing pains which will continue to be stressed in the coming months and years. But better to have a growing pain than a shrinking pain, right?
‘What we’re trying to explain to them is that we’re a very different franchise to what we were four or five years ago. Three or four years from now we need to be a different franchise again.
‘The message to the network is please come with us, please make the investments, please come back to the things we need you to focus on. That way we can all grow together.’
So what should dealers be focusing on to grow with the brand?
‘We’ve spoken many times in the past to the network, almost to the point where they’re fed-up listening to us, about used cars,’ Jim explained. ‘But that’s one of the biggest areas we need to focus on. Many of the growing pains the network will experience will come from increasing their ability to absorb the cars as they come back to them.
‘The used car capacity of the network needs to grow.
‘Qashqai in particular represents a great opportunity for us and we need to maximise that throughout our network. It’s important for our RVs and it’s important for a dealer’s profit margins.
‘We’ve been putting things in place to try to support that – we’ve got a field team and we’ve been subsidising used car service plans. I think dealers now acknowledge that and are starting to put their own measures in place too.’
Profit opportunity
Another critical issue is the network’s performance in key areas like customer service and satisfaction. Jim believes this is essential to retain existing customers and attract even more customers to the brand. To this end, the soon-to-be-introduced practice of publishing dealers’ KPI scores will, he hopes, lead to the whole network raising its game.
Jim said: ‘As a generalisation, those dealers who do well against KPIs do really, really well, but it’s those who don’t do so well we need to focus on as we need to bring our average up.
‘Everyone should want to improve because if you’re doing the job well it will offer you a profit opportunity. If you’re increasing your share you should sell more cars and make more money; if you’re treating your customers better you should get higher loyalty and therefore have an opportunity to make more money.
‘Talking to dealers about their performance can sometimes be a painful conversation but we will support them.’
Overall, though, there’s great reason to be optimistic.
‘We have some fantastic products coming through and provided we get all our ducks in a row the future is very bright and the opportunities for growth and increased profitability are outstanding.’