I had no idea they had passed both Toyota and Volkswagen.
From Forbes, who for some reason reverse the order of the names in their headline, July 28:
Nissan-Renault Officially World’s Largest Automaker At Halftime
Today, at 1:30 p.m. Tokyo time, a long-standing desire of Carlos Ghosn was fulfilled. Ghosn’s life work, the Renault-Nissan Group, can be called World’s Largest Automaker, for the first half of the year, at least. The man who had similar urges, Volkswagen’s Martin Winterkorn, now lives in infamy. His company became world’s largest last year, when Winterkorn was gone. At halftime, Volkswagen was back in #2.
Yesterday, the Renault-Nissan Alliance reported half-year sales of 5,268,079 units. A week earlier, Volkswagen said in its monthly global sales report that it delivered 5,155,600 units in the first six months. Today after lunch, Toyota published its 6 month sales and production results, and said it had sold 5,129,000 units January through June. Ghosn’s Renault-Nissan Alliance was king of the hill.
Of course, people at the Alliance were quick to allege that the title means absolutely nothing. An hour before the Alliance sent out its numbers yesterday, Nissan’s chief of investor relations, Joji Tagawa, claimed in Yokohama that he doesn’t “really care whether we are number one, number two, or number three. That’s not an important performance indicator. How can we leverage size is important.”...MUCH MORE
