“Our full-year financial results are a wake-up call,” Espinosa told the press. “The reality is very clear.”
Last week, Toyota said it expected profits for its current financial year to drop 21% because of tariffs and the falling U.S. dollar. Its erstwhile rival Honda, which reported earnings the same day as Nissan, said its full-year profits would take an even bigger hit. Honda lowered its annual forecast 59%. On Tuesday, when it announced its full year financial results, Nissan did not offer guidance for 2025 for operating profit and net income citing “uncertainty related to tariff environment.”
Toyota, Honda, and Nissan did not respond to a request for comment.
“The impact of tariff policies in various countries on our business has been very significant, and frequent revisions are made, making it difficult to formulate an outlook,” Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe told reporters.
Meanwhile, Nissan abandoned plans for a $1.1 billion electric-vehicle battery factory in Japan altogether. As part of its broader cost-savings work, Nissan is reducing the number of manufacturing plants from 17 to 10.
Toyota and Nissan did not respond to requests for comments.
With trade policy making the U.S. market a challenge, in China, carmakers face threats from domestic competitors that sell equal or better cars at a much lower price. Chinese car companies have started releasing cheap, high-quality electric vehicles. Many of these products caught foreign automakers off guard, leaving them scrambling to catch up. As the world’s largest auto market, falling behind in China can have severe consequences for global car companies—all the more so, if they face headwinds in the U.S.
Meanwhile, Nissan has plans to flood the Chinese market with a lineup of new cars. In April, Nissan announced it would invest $1.4 billion into the Chinese market and launch 10 new vehicles. Nissan’s China head Stephen Ma said the company had been “slow” in the China market.
“The Chinese brands were too fast, to be honest,” Ma said at a Shanghai auto show in April. “They were exceptional in how fast they moved. It took everybody by surprise. Now I think we have reset.”
