Papin to take lead for Nissan in the Americas

In an old-is-new-again move, Nissan Motor Co. is readopting a hemisphere-wide management structure for North and South America.

It is a structure Nissan turned to in 2007 in an effort to bring its central U.S. management team to bear on boosting penetration in markets such as Brazil and Argentina. But Nissan moved away from the structure in 2014 as executives turned their attention to increasing U.S. market share.

Now, Jeremie Papin, 47, will be elevated April 1 to the role of chairman of the Americas, giving him responsibility for Nissan's operations across North and South America.

Papin currently is vice chairman of North America, overseeing the U.S., Canada and Mexico. He assumed that role last June.

The new approach is part of a four-year transformation plan in which Nissan is realigning its global operations from seven regions into four: Japan-ASEAN, China, the Americas, and AMIEO (Africa, Middle East, India, Europe and Oceania).

"This realignment enables Nissan to be more competitive by improving the speed of our operations and help deploy our latest technologies consistently and quickly to customers the world over," the automaker said.

For the past year, Papin has been leading Nissan's turnaround in its critical U.S. market, which suffered its largest annual percentage sales decline in company history in 2020.

Nissan Division sold 819,715 vehicles in 2020, down 33 percent from the year earlier.

Papin has led Nissan's product reboot that brings six new or redesigned vehicles to dealerships by the end of 2021. He joined Nissan North America in 2018 as senior vice president of finance. Before that, he held leadership roles in finance, corporate planning, corporate strategy and business development at Groupe Renault and the Renault-Nissan- Mitsubishi alliance.