- Thank you very much for joining us today, Ivan. I know you're very busy, but I wanted to ask you about the issue that's at the top of everybody's mind, which is events in the Middle East. How do you see what's going on there impacting Nissan? - It's a unfortunate situation that we are living in today. Nissan has a broad operation in the Middle East, so we export a lot of cars to the Middle East, and at the moment, the main difficulty that we are facing is the lack of access to deliver products to our customers. We also see potential risks on raw material increase and logistics costs increase because of the oil price increase.

As for the long-term implication, it's a bit hard to give you an outlook at the moment. It's too soon to estimate what could potentially happen, but maybe looking back on what happened when hybrid market boom in North America a few years back, one of the main drivers for this was the fuel price. - [Emma] There's so much uncertainty out there. It isn't just what's going on in the Middle East. Just before the Middle East, you had to deal with tariffs. How do you manage to run your business when there's so much uncertainty out there - By building resiliency.

The positive thing about Nissan is, we are a global company, so we diversify a bit of risks, we are present in many markets, and we can, you know, flexibly react to recessions, of course, up to a level. This is why we need to continue doubling down on the efforts on costs and improving our operations on a daily basis. The good thing is, Nissan has a good product diversity, so we have very competent ICE products, but we have also hybrids in the pipeline. We will be launching the all-new Rogue with the hybrid powertrain in the US later this year, and we have, of course, EVs that can help us cope with this.

- Do you think that the EV adoption is quite low in the US? Is that likely to pick up? - I think it will gradually pick up. I think what we see is, of course, a result of the change of policy. We will see what the future policies are, but we think in the long term, there will be more and more popularity for EVs. Probably not at the level we were anticipating a few years ago, but we do see that particularly customers that already bought an EV, they stay with an EV and they continue buying EVs.

- Japan, very, very tough. - [Emma] Trump is putting pressure on companies like Nissan to invest in the United States. How are you responding to that? - Well, we have two very big manufacturing sites already in North America, in Smyrna, Tennessee, and in Canton, Mississippi, where we produce seven vehicle lines, which are very popular in North America. And we will continue focusing our efforts on marketing these products because they're tariff-free and they are driving today the profitability of our business, so we will continue doing so and we will continue investing where it makes sense.

- You've speculated in recent interviews as to whether Nissan can stay relevant at its current scale. Do you think that ultimately a company like Nissan, in order to survive, needs a partner? - My goal is to make Nissan survive and to make Nissan relevant, so a partner is not the goal. A partner will be a means to achieve something. One good example is the partnership that we signed with Wayve. We want to be one of the leaders in autonomous technology, and we've been working with autonomous technology ourselves for quite a long time.

We're very experienced on what is called decision-based autonomous technology, and the new technology now is AI-based. And we found this partner, which is a great company, experts in AI, that they have what it's called a autonomous driver stack. And we're collaborating with them to bring the best technology to our customers. - [Emma] Might you talk to Honda again? Might you- - I talk to Honda a lot because we are working a lot on projects as I've said before. It's no secret we are working to see what we could do together in North America because both companies need to, you know, face the difficulties of the tariffs

that we are facing today. So, we are talking a lot about what we could potentially do in that area, yeah. - So, China has become very successful when it comes to electric vehicles. How does that affect a company like Nissan? - Well, we have changed the way we approach the market. So, we have a JV partner, Dongfeng, which we've been working with for over 20 years, and we decided to, you know, jointly develop products completely for the Chinese customer. The first product that we developed on this new approach is called N7, and it's been a great success.

It's a product that has helped us reverse the decline in volumes. Up until the launch of this product, we were consistently losing ground year-over-year, and after that launch, we started to stop this decline. - Do you think companies like Nissan and other non-Chinese automakers have a future in China? - Well, it's a difficult market, of course, but in the end for me, the learning was, once we change the way we approach the market, we discovered that the Nissan brand still has a lot of value. And when you make a good product center around the customer, you can still do a successful, you know, performance, and this is what we continue doing.

We will continue launching products that are, you know, focused around the Chinese customer. And more so, we will export some of these products outside of China to defend ourselves in some of the markets where some of these aggressive local Chinese players are coming. - [Emma] Given all the issues that are facing the auto industry, how do you manage stress? - How do I manage stress? Well, I try to continue being myself, so I like to play tennis on the weekends. If I can't, I play golf.

I'm also a musician as maybe some of you know, so I like to play the drums. So, I have a band. Every now and then, we get together and we play for a while, and this helps me, you know, staying real and staying true to myself. - So, when you meet the new Japanese Prime Minister, will you invite her to come and do some drumming with you? Is that something- - Absolutely. I haven't met her, but I do know she's a car enthusiast and she's a drummer, so we have two things in common, and I think we have a lot of things to talk about based on those two things. Of course, we can talk about industry and other things,

but at least we share some common, you know, likes in life, yeah.