Nissan’s global sales from April through August came to 1,105,661 vehicles, 152,192 fewer than in the same five months of 2025, according to the company’s September 29 production and sales report. China accounted for 114,875 of the missing sales.
That split is the key to reading Nissan’s year. Outside China, its sales fell 3.8% over those five months, by The Auto Wire’s count from the company’s tables. In China they fell 41.9%, and in August alone Nissan sold 28,275 vehicles there, down 51.9%. The global total is sliding toward a level Nissan hasn’t seen since the early 2000s. Most of the slide is happening in the one big market where Nissan doesn’t book the revenue, which is why the company can lose volume and still report rising sales in yen. What it can’t do is hit its own volume forecast without a turnaround that hasn’t started yet.
Nissan’s forecast needs an 8% rebound after a 12% slide
Nissan began its fiscal year in April expecting global retail sales to rise 4.7% to 3.3 million vehicles, according to its May 13 results filing. With its first-quarter results on August 3, the company cut that outlook to 3.15 million and said the revision mainly reflected market conditions in China. Nissan’s fiscal 2025 total was 3,151,164, so the revised plan amounts to a flat year.
Flat now takes a strong finish. To reach 3.15 million, Nissan has to sell about 2,044,000 vehicles from September through March. It sold 1,893,311 in those seven months a year earlier, so the target calls for roughly 8% growth in the back half of a year in which it is running 12.1% behind. If the September-to-March stretch declines at the same 12.1% rate, the year ends near 2.77 million. That’s The Auto Wire’s arithmetic, not a company projection, and seasonal swings in China and Japan’s March selling season could move it either way.
For scale, Nissan’s 2002 annual report put fiscal 2002 global sales at 2,771,000. The following year’s report gave fiscal 2003 as 3,057,000, the year the company was rebuilding under its NISSAN 180 plan. Last fiscal year’s 3.15 million was already Nissan’s smallest total since then. Anything under 3.06 million this year would be its smallest since fiscal 2002.
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Why China’s collapse barely dents Nissan’s revenue
Nissan’s main business in China is its joint venture with Dongfeng, and since fiscal 2013 it has reported that venture under equity-method accounting, a note it carries in its quarterly results releases. Under that method, the vehicles the joint venture sells count toward Nissan’s global sales total, but the joint venture’s revenue never enters Nissan’s consolidated revenue. Nissan records its share of the venture’s profit instead, below the operating line.
That explains a first quarter that looks contradictory on paper. From April through June, while China volume was falling, Nissan’s net revenue rose to ¥2.964 trillion from ¥2.707 trillion a year earlier. It posted operating profit of ¥77.9 billion after a ¥79.1 billion operating loss in the same quarter of 2025, and net income attributable to shareholders of ¥3.8 billion after a ¥115.8 billion loss. The company credited about ¥60 billion of cost savings in the quarter to its Re:Nissan restructuring plan, and said one-time gains related to fiscal 2025 U.S. tariffs also helped operating profit. It kept its full-year operating profit outlook of ¥200 billion.
China still costs Nissan money when it shrinks. A smaller joint venture earns a smaller profit for Nissan to share in, and Nissan’s recovery plan there leans on new energy vehicles such as the N6, N7 and NX8 and on exporting cars built in China. The company’s own timeline for renewed growth there starts in 2027. Even so, the volume headline overstates the immediate damage to the income statement, and anyone reading Nissan’s monthly sales count as a direct measure of its financial health will misjudge it.
The rest of the map is mixed. Over April through August, sales rose 3.3% in Japan and 0.7% in North America, while Europe fell 12.1% and Nissan’s “others” region, which takes in the Middle East, fell 17.2%. Chief Executive Ivan Espinosa named both trouble spots in August: “The environment remains challenging, particularly in China and the Middle East, but our direction is clear.” In the same release, Nissan said it expected volumes outside China to grow year over year. Through August they are down 3.8%.
Nissan’s U.S. plants are now outbuilding Mexico
The production table in the same report shows a shift that has nothing to do with China. From April through August, Nissan built 244,606 vehicles in the United States, up 32.0%, and 216,332 in Mexico, down 23.7%. In fiscal 2025, Mexico outproduced the U.S. by more than 100,000 vehicles, 611,695 to 504,812.
Two decisions drive that. Nissan said in July 2025 that it would move production out of its CIVAC plant in Cuernavaca, which built the NP300, Frontier and Versa, and consolidate it at Aguascalientes by the end of fiscal 2025. The other is Washington. Proclamation 10908, signed March 26, 2025, put a 25% tariff on imported automobiles starting April 3, 2025. Vehicles that qualify under the USMCA trade agreement can have that tariff applied only to the value of their non-U.S. content. A car assembled in Mexico from largely imported parts still pays on most of its value; a car assembled in Tennessee or Mississippi avoids the vehicle tariff entirely, though imported parts can carry their own duties. Moving output north is the most direct way a manufacturer can shrink that bill, and Nissan is far from alone in paying it. Toyota’s filings show the cost on a much larger scale, as The Auto Wire reported last month.
The plant shuffle is also how Nissan is resizing itself for a smaller sales base. Its May results release said the company is cutting its global manufacturing footprint from 17 sites to 10, with work underway at seven of them. In Japan, Nissan has said it will end vehicle production at its Oppama plant at the end of fiscal 2027 and shift that work to Nissan Motor Kyushu in Fukuoka. Mexico remains central to Nissan’s business, and its position there faces fresh pressure from Chinese automakers weighing local plants.
In the U.S., fewer rental Nissans and more retail buyers
The United States is where Nissan’s strategy shows up at the dealership. The company’s October 1 U.S. sales release reported third-quarter Nissan Group sales of 226,474, up 1.4%. Retail sales, the ones made to individual buyers on a dealer lot, rose 7.8% to 196,018. Sales to rental fleets fell 45% in the quarter and 33% for the year to date. Nissan calls itself the fastest-growing mainstream brand in the U.S.; the release does not say whose data supports that claim. Tiago Castro, Nissan’s senior vice president of U.S. marketing and sales, said: “The most important part of this story isn’t simply that we’re growing, it’s how we’re growing.”
For people who already own a Rogue or a Sentra, the rental cut is the part of this that reaches their wallet. Rental companies buy cars in bulk at a discount, run them for a year or so, and send them to auction in waves. A steady supply of one-year-old, low-mileage copies of the same model pulls down what dealers will pay for everyone else’s car of that model, which shows up in trade-in offers and in the residual values lenders set on new leases. Fewer Nissans going into rental fleets now means fewer flooding the used market later. That support for resale values is a slow effect, and incentives and interest rates can swamp it, but it is the kind of change a brand makes when it’s trying to stop living on volume. It also means fewer total cars, which is part of why the global count keeps falling. Nissan’s U.S. picture also sits inside a wider reshuffle of the American market, where Cox Automotive forecast Detroit’s combined share at a record low for the third quarter.
Nissan’s monthly reports through March will test the 3.15 million forecast
Nissan’s own forecast sets the scorecard. Each monthly sales report from here needs year-over-year gains, outside China first, to stay on a path to 3.15 million. China’s monthly totals will show whether the N6, N7 and NX8 can slow a decline that hit 51.9% in August. The first-half financial results this fall will show whether the ¥200 billion operating profit outlook survives lower volume. If Nissan cuts the volume number again while holding the profit number, it will be telling investors and dealers that it expects to make money as a company of fewer than 3 million cars a year, a size it last operated at more than two decades ago.
Is a smaller Nissan that sells fewer cars at better margins the right bet, or does a brand of its size need to win back volume to survive?