Nissan and Honda slam on the brakes
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
From the BBC World Service: The Japanese car giants Honda and Nissan have abandoned plans for a merger, which would have created one of the world’s biggest carmakers. It’s been a long road to get here, but we’ll hear about how those plans fell apart. Also on the program: We’ll unpack what’s next in the United Kingdom’s biggest miscarriage of justice — the U.K. post office scandal.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That Honda-Nissan merger is officially a non-starter. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Good morning. It could have been a beautiful relationship. Honda and Nissan, two of the world's biggest car companies were talking about joining forces to become the third leading car company in the |
| 0:21.4 | world. Today, they officially announced those talks have ended, but they will still work together |
| 0:26.8 | in areas like EVs. Let's get the latest from the BBC's. Mariko, oy, hello. Hello. Mariko, |
| 0:32.9 | there was so much potential in this. What happened? The talk seems to have collapsed a couple of weeks ago, |
| 0:38.8 | and a lot of Japanese media was reporting about it. And none of it, you know, not all of them |
| 0:44.3 | would be confirmed as an official lines, but a lot of media reports suggested that basically |
| 0:50.2 | Nissan wanted to be treated as an equal partner in a joint holding company when Honda's |
| 0:56.6 | market value is like five times bigger. And as a result, Honda initially reportedly offered to make |
| 1:03.7 | Nissan subsidiary. And Nissan's executive said, definitely not. We're not going to do that. So they |
| 1:10.2 | just decided that it's better if they just |
| 1:12.6 | stop talking now. So that's it. Nothing's going to happen. It's just a total flop. Nothing comes out of it. |
| 1:18.9 | Well, we'll see. I mean, the interesting thing is, again, like I have to cite so many different |
| 1:23.4 | reports because none of this is kind of officially confirmed. But a lot of reports in Japan were |
| 1:28.7 | saying that basically Foxcon, the company in Taiwan, which is known to produce Apple's iPhones, |
| 1:36.0 | and apparently Foxcon was interested. And apparently the Japanese government wasn't too keen on |
| 1:41.7 | that deal because they wanted to keep Nissan Japanese |
| 1:44.6 | and asked Honda to get involved and that didn't work out. |
| 1:48.3 | So now Foxconn has been quoted as saying that they are interested in having a stake in |
| 1:54.0 | Nissan. |
| 1:54.8 | The chairman spoke to the press earlier today in Taiwan and he said that he's not interested |
| 2:00.0 | in basically taking over Nissan, but he is interested in having a stake in Taiwan. And he said that he's not interested in basically taking over Nissan, |
| 2:01.7 | but he is interested in having a stake in Nissan. So we assume that talks will continue, but when |
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