Nissan Motor ceased production at one of its two plants in Indonesia earlier this year in response to a sharp fall in local demand for the brand, according to local reports.
Citing unnamed sources close to the company, the reports suggested the last Nissan-brand car produced by PT Nissan Motor Indonesia actually left the assembly line as far back as February 2019 after the carmaker opted for drastic cost cutting measures as losses continued to mount.
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The company announced in July 2019 it would cut a total of 2,500 jobs in India and Indonesia combined by March 2020 as part of its global restructuring programme.
Local deliveries of Nissan brand vehicles plunged 52% to 6,885 units in 2018, according to local industry association Gaikindo, from 14,488 units in 2017 while the overall vehicle market was up by 6.6% at 1,151,291 units that year.
Nissan had been struggling to compete with the more successful Japanese manufacturers operating in Indonesia, particularly Toyota, Daihatsu, Honda and Suzuki, plus rising Chinese brand Wuling.
The now redundant Purwakarta facility has production capacity of 150,000 units on two shifts but this has been vastly under-utilised practically since the beginning.
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By GlobalDataNissan also completed construction of a 100,000 unit engine and gearbox plant in 2018.
Production of the Nissan Livina small car earlier this year was transferred to alliance partner Mitsubishi Motors' newly built factory nearby which also produces MMC's own, highly successful Xpander MPV. Most other Nissan models are now imported, mainly from Thailand and Japan.
Nissan's second Indonesian plant, a 100,000 unit facility completed on the same site in 2014 to produce the entry-level Datsun models, remains operational.
The Datsun brand has performed slightly better than Nissan in Indonesia since its launch in 2014 with local deliveries down only marginally at 10,400 units in 2018.
But this second plant, too, is operating at a fraction of its designated capacity.
In the first half of 2019, Nissan's sales in Indonesia rebounded by almost 50% year on year to 7,200 units while Datsun's sales were, in contrast, down sharply – also by around 50% to 3,860 units.
