Mitsubishi’s French affair gets serious

In October 2016, Nissan acquired a 34% stake in Mitsubishi Motors. This gave the company effective control without needing to account fully for both Mitsubishi’s financial stresses and the strains on its own balance sheet. Under Japanese law, this gave Nissan a controlling stake over its smaller erstwhile competitor. Since then, however, there have been very few cases of shared engineering or production activities, other than some modest co-operation in vans in south-east Asia and in the kei segment in Japan.