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The Japanese companies are considering joining forces to survive in a rapidly changing auto industry, but auto history is filled with troubled and failed marriages.
By Neal E. Boudette
Michigan-based Neal Boudette has covered the automotive sector for more than two decades.
Honda and Nissan Japanese car manufacturers are in conversations about an imaginable fusion, in an attempt by price percentage and compete in a rapid movement industry and increasingly competitive.
But a merger, even between two corporations from the same country, is no guarantee of success, and the history of auto deals is fraught with disappointments.
Combining two global giant production operations is an incredibly challenging task that consists of reconciling other technologies, models and commercial approaches. The good luck of a fusion is based on the cooperation of managers and ambitious engineers that have passed decades competing with each other. The teams and projects will have to be abandoned or changed, and leaders will have to give strength to others. In some cases, merged corporations are paralyzed by elected leaders that force them to continue operating plants that generate losses.
Thomas Stallkamp, an automotive representative founded on Michigan, worried about the struggles connected to one of the largest car fuses, Chrysler’s merger in 1998 and the German corporate daimler. Mr. Stallkamp spent years occupied control posts in Chrysler and Daimlerchrysler.
“Car companies are big, complicated organizations, with large engineering staffs, manufacturing plants all over the world, hundreds of thousands of employees, in a capital-intensive business,” Mr. Stallkamp said. “You try to put two of them together and you run into a lot of egos and infighting, so it’s very, very difficult to make it work.”
Honda and Nissan announced their goal of working together this year in the electric car sector and on Monday officially discussed extending this cooperation to a merger that could also come with Mitsubishi Motors, a small manufacturer that works closely with Nissan Array. . The partnership would unite the second and third largest Japanese automakers, after Toyota, and create a company that would be third globally in terms of number of cars produced, after Toyota and Volkswagen.
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