Four retirements, a CFO departure, and a sweeping reorganization — all in the span of a single week. Nissan is reshuffling its executive ranks with a speed and scale that suggests the Re:Nissan turnaround plan is anything but routine cleanup.
The automaker announced a broad set of management changes effective April 1, promoting several mid-level executives into corporate leadership while absorbing the exits of at least five senior figures. Among the departures: Hari Nada, the controversial long-serving executive who spent 35 years at the company, and Anish Baijal, who led global HR strategy and transformation.
Those exits land just days after the bigger bombshell — CFO Jérémie Papin stepping down after barely 14 months in the role, citing personal reasons. Papin had been installed in January 2025 specifically to impose financial discipline during the restructuring. His replacement, George Leondis, is a 20-year Nissan veteran who most recently oversaw finance for the automaker’s Europe region. Papin will stay through mid-May to close out the fiscal year, then he’s gone.
Nissan’s official framing is corporate boilerplate: “clarity, stability, and disciplined execution.” CEO Ivan Espinosa praised Papin for embedding financial discipline during “an important phase of our recovery.” The press release said priorities remain unchanged.
But the volume of change tells a different story.
Richard Candler, who ran global product strategy, gets elevated to corporate executive overseeing family, product, and components strategy — reporting directly to Espinosa. Kinichi Tanuma, who had been running two product development divisions, is being moved to an undefined “leadership role within the Nissan Group,” his responsibilities carved up and handed to two other executives. Kazuhiko Murata, who ran powertrain and EV component production engineering, gets the same vague reassignment. A plant director from Yokohama takes his place.
In ASEAN, Toshihiro Fujiki shifts from running the Thailand operation to heading global aftersales — while simultaneously being asked to “support the execution of the Re:Nissan recovery plan in ASEAN.” That’s a dual mandate that reads like the region needs more hands-on attention than Nissan wants to publicly admit.
China gets attention too. Hirofumi Eta, a chief vehicle engineer, becomes regional senior vice president for R&D in China, with a dual reporting line to both the China management committee and the Dongfeng Nissan Technical Center. Dual reporting structures are never a sign of simplicity.
The financial backdrop makes all of this urgent. Nissan posted a net loss of nearly $1.5 billion in the first half of fiscal year 2025. Operating profit swung to a loss of 27.7 billion yen — roughly $181 million — a $430 million deterioration from the prior year. The Re:Nissan restructuring plan, launched in May 2025, was supposed to arrest that slide. Nissan says it’s now in the plan’s final year.
Final year is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The company is simultaneously losing its CFO, retiring its HR transformation chief, splitting product development leadership, and rotating its ASEAN president into a global role. That’s not the behavior of an organization coasting to a finish line. That’s triage.
Espinosa, who took over as president and CEO during the restructuring, now presides over a leadership team that looks substantially different from the one that started the turnaround. Whether that’s a sign of renewal or instability depends entirely on what Nissan’s next earnings report looks like.
The automaker has repeatedly insisted Re:Nissan is on track. The parade of departures and promotions suggests the track itself keeps shifting.
Share this Story