The Mexican-born engineer had taken the top role at the Global 500 Japanese carmaker during its worst crisis in its 92-year-long history. Espinosa is Nissan’s fourth CEO in eight years; his predecessor, Makoto Uchida, stepped down after merger talks with Honda—at the time, Japan’s No. 2 carmaker—fell apart. Nissan was losing money, losing customer appeal, and losing market share. 

“We were emerging from a long period of negative coverage because of our financial situation and the Honda deal collapsing. Everything you read in the news was negative,” he recalled. “How do we reignite our attractiveness? How do we bring customers back? How do we motivate our employees?”

Espinosa now faces the challenging task of revitalizing an automaker that’s getting hit on multiple fronts. Fierce domestic competition has eroded its footprint in China, one of its most important markets. Tariffs on Japanese products are complicating its operations in the U.S., another of its important markets. Shareholders are upset with massive losses and strategic bets that dramatically flamed out.

So how is Espinosa, who spent most of his Nissan tenure on the product side of the business, approaching this challenge? The answer is a combination of “painful” decisions, a focus on speed and, perhaps surprisingly for a CEO leading a turnaround effort, empathy.

Nissan’s deepest crisis yet

Nissan, founded in 1933, is emerging from its lowest point since at least 1999, when French carmaker Renault bailed it out, and perhaps at any point in its 92-year-long history. The company never regained its footing after the 2018 arrest of its high-flying, flamboyant Brazilian-born French-Lebanese CEO Carlos Ghosn for alleged financial misconduct. Nissan’s revenue between its 2017 and 2025 fiscal years grew by just 0.4%, compared to 63% for Toyota Motor.

The first threat to Nissan came from China. The world’s second-largest economy had long been a cash cow for foreign carmakers like Nissan, General Motors and Toyota. But in the early 2020s, affordable, yet still sophisticated, Chinese cars—particularly electric vehicles—began to win over Chinese drivers. Nissan, like many of its foreign peers, was slow to catch up, putting them out of step with local tastes.

In December 2024, Nissan embarked on what seemed like a last-ditch effort to save the company: A merger with Honda Motor to build a car giant that could compete with Toyota and fend off upstarts like BYD. Yet talks broke down after Honda argued that it wanted to make Nissan a subsidiary, rather than an equal partner. Talks collapsed by February 2025; Uchida was out soon after, replaced by Espinosa. 

The next threat, which came just a few days after Espinosa took the job, was U.S. tariffs on Japanese goods. U.S. President Donald Trump initially hiked duties on Japanese cars up to 27.5%. Negotiations finally got those tariffs reduced to 15%, which is still significantly more than the original 2.5%.

Non-Japanese CEOs of Japanese companies are rare; the most prominent examples, like Ghosn or former Olympus CEO Michael Christopher Woodford, have left under dramatic circumstances. Foreign-born CEOs have often struggled to implement non-Japanese practices and work well with domestic bureaucracies.  

Still, Espinosa joked that he’s “born in Nissan,” rather than Mexico. “Since I finished engineering school, I’ve worked at this company. It’s the only thing I know,” he says. He joined Nissan in 2003 working as a product specialist in his home country; he held positions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Europe before eventually moving to Japan to be Nissan’s chief product planning officer. 

He’s spent most of his career deciding which cars the company should build, on which platforms, and for which customers. That’s given him a perspective on what’s missing at Nissan and other carmakers. “I think car manufacturers—in general—have forgotten about the passion for cars,” he mused to Top Gear in 2023. 

‘Guys, this is what we’re good at!’

Even before he’d taken the top role, Espinosa was trying to speed things up at Nissan. He pushed the company to trim its development time for a new model to three years, down from four-and-a-half. That meant ditching some of the traditional tools used in vehicle design, like the clay models used by car designers since the 1930s. Instead, “we are using a lot of digital tools and AI,” Espinosa says. “Even the sketches that are done at the beginning, not necessarily all of them made by human designers. We are using AI to help their brains get inspiration.” (Since taking the top role, he’s managed to get the time to develop new models down to just over two years)

But Espinosa knew more radical changes would be needed once he became CEO. “I’d been with the company for almost 25 years. I knew what had been done, and what had not been done,” he says. Previous management teams had hoped that the company’s costs could be covered just by increasing sales volume. “We couldn’t,” he said. “It was obvious you had to resize the company.”

Last May, Espinosa unveiled the Re:NISSAN plan, an aggressive restructuring drive to cut costs by 500 billion yen ($3.1 billion) and earn an operating profit by early 2027. To get there, Nissan pledged to cut 20,000 jobs and reduce the number of plants from 17 to 10. “We must prioritize self-improvement with greater urgency and speed, aiming for profitability that relies less on volume,” Espinosa said at the time. 

Since then, Nissan has announced plans to close its plant in Kanagawa, Japan—which has been in operation since 1961—and sold off facilities in South Africa and Mexico. 

“Many hard decisions were made that were necessary to be made, and we made them with a lot of responsibility and care,” he told Fortune.

Espinosa described his approach as having three pillars. First is fixing Nissan’s cost structure, reducing its manufacturing footprint and revamping its supply chain. Second is bringing customers back into showrooms and restoring pride among employees. And third is working closely with partners like Renault and Chinese manufacturer Dongfeng to get speed and scale rather than try to do everything alone. 

He also needed to create a more open company. “The previous leadership felt a bit distant from employees and—I assume because of the difficulties the company was going through—they were not talking a lot to the media,” he recalls. Espinosa set up the “Call Me Ivan” channel that allowed employees to pose questions directly to him; he also established a cultural transformation program that encourages people not to “do things just because you’ve been doing them for the past 10 years.”

Espinosa saw the Japan Mobility Show last October, where Nissan debuted new versions of the Elgrand, Leaf, Rogue and Z, as a milestone for his turnaround plan. “People started to feel more confident because they saw people talking about cars again. Maybe we aren’t so bad at making cars,” he said. “Like, guys, this is what we’re good at!”

Getting China momentum back

He’s also eager to revive the China market. Nissan derives roughly one-third of its business from China. Yet Nissan’s old approach of designing cars internationally and adapting them for local tastes has failed. 

Espinosa’s answer was a vehicle built entirely in China. The N7 is an electric sedan developed in 24 months in partnership with Dongfeng, designed and engineered by Chinese teams, with some models priced as low as 119,900 Chinese yuan ($17,600) to compete directly against domestic Chinese EV brands. By August 2025, monthly deliveries had reached 10,148 units.

“We have the cost, the speed, and the technology of China because we built the car there,” Espinosa said. “The pricing is on par with local OEMs. It’s a car that is profitable for us, and it was designed from beginning to end in 24 months.”

When it comes to the U.S., Nissan is working to produce more cars domestically. Nissan ended the 2025 calendar year with approximately 58% of its U.S.-market vehicles using local content, up from 45% a year earlier; the company is working toward 60%. Espinosa sees tariffs as an opportunity to build a better Nissan. “It just made us target a stronger and more resilient organization–and, wow, it’s working,” he said. “You have a China ecosystem, and you have the U.S. ecosystem. If you want to be a global company, you need to live in both.” 

An ongoing turnaround

Nissan generated 12 trillion yen ($74 billion) in revenue in its last fiscal year, which ended March 31 2026, a 5% drop. It also reported a 533 billion yen ($3 billion) net loss, following a 671 billion yen ($4.2 billion) loss the year before. 

Nissan expects to return to overall profitability by its next fiscal year, forecasting a modest 20 billion yen ($120 million) in net profit. 

Still, Espinosa still has to deal with a frustrated shareholder base that is hungry to see improvement at the company. Nissan shares have lost 45% of their value over the past five years, compared to 26% and 42% jumps for Honda and Toyota respectively. 

Nissan’s annual general meeting, held in June after Fortune’s conversation with Espinosa, was particularly fractious. Disgruntled shareholders rejected the reappointment of one independent board director, and proposed several motions to remove Espinosa as chair of the meeting; one particularly daring investor even proposed bringing Ghosn back as CEO. 

The market’s impatience underscores a deeper challenge inside Nissan. The company may be showing some signs of financial stabilization, but sustaining a turnaround will depend on whether change takes hold throughout the entire organization. 

“I need to continue spreading the values that we want to bring in the company down to the lower levels of the organization,” he admits. “So far, we’re probably doing well in the top line, middle management. But the lower management—this is where things are still a bit challenging. I need to dedicate more time to that.”

In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.