Julio Panama Becomes President Of Nissan Mexicana
The sales and marketing vice president of Nissan Mexicana, Julio Panama has recently become the president of the Mexico subsidiary.
Panama, 54 has earlier headed Nissan Mexicana as the purchasing director, sales and marketing vice president as well as president of Nissan South Africa. He became the subsidiary’s sales and marketing vice president in April.
The appointment will be effective July 1 onwards and he will report to Hiroto Saikawa, president of Nissan Americas’ management committee in Nashville
Panama has replaced Shoichi Miyatani, who has completed two years as head of the Nissan Mexicana. Miyatani is an economist and foreign trade specialist. He will further take over the charge as the vice president in Nissan general overseas unit. Miyatani will be responsible for the sales and marketing in Latin America.
Miyatani has headed Nissan Mexicana successfully for two years since January, 2006 accounting an increase in production at the Aguascalientes and Cuernavaca assembly plants. The production resumed to 496,077 units in 2007, from 407,309 in 2006.
The general overseas unit covers all markets outside Japan, Europe and the United States. The unit will be the main contributor to growth in fiscal year 2008. Reportedly, in fiscal year 2007, the unit has made satisfactory sales that accounted to 1.06 million vehicles out of worldwide sales of 3.77 million. It has been estimated that Nissan will make sales of 3.9 million vehicles worldwide by the end of 2008.
Apart from this, Nissan has integrated manufacturing/purchasing and R&D in Mexico into its regional organization. It is headed by Bill Krueger, Nissan Americas’ senior vice president and Motohiro Matsumura, president of Nissan’s North American Technical Center, in suburban Detroit. Nissan has a total of 9,000 employees in Mexico.
