INTERVIEW
‘I CONSIDER MYSELF A BIT OF A DISRUPTOR’ There’s nothing Nissan Motor GB’s MD Andrew Humberstone likes better than a challenge, reports James Batchelor.
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ou could forgive Andrew Humberstone for feeling hard done by at the hand he’s been dealt, but far from it. He was made managing director of Nissan Motor GB in January 2020, replacing Kalyana Sivagnanam, but just a couple of months later... well, we all know what happened. ‘There are so many external disruptors. It’s actually one of the reasons why I love the industry space so much,’ he says with a little smile. ‘There are the ones you can predict and the ones you can’t. Covid – we didn’t predict that. Ukraine – we didn’t predict that either.’ He continues: ‘But, you know, there’s so much going on in our space – whether it’s online, shifting consumer behaviour, changing manufacturing concepts, or whether it’s managing waste and energy. Or perhaps it’s even the surging costs of raw materials – it’s all of these things. ‘It’s all happening. It’s really quite dynamic. And if I think back five, six years ago, it all was so different. It was a very stable, structured 20-year plan – you knew what products were coming and the pipelines were very visible. ‘It’s a different world now.’ For this interview, we met in Nissan’s Live Showroom in Watford. It opened last year but was recently expanded because of a shift in consumers’ wishes to communicate with Nissan digitally. It’s a retail concept you’d find hard to imagine from Nissan pre-pandemic, and perfectly demonstrates Humberstone’s belief that the industry has changed. Behind the polite smile, it’s clear Humberstone is a very confident leader, with clear ideas on where he wants to take this very Japanese of Japanese car brands. ‘I consider myself a bit of a disruptor,’ he states. ‘I always put my hand up and head above the parapet to take on challenges to problems. When I look at a business, I always say, what are the isomorphic elements that need to be adjusted? What are the key challenges that we’re not touching? Because if a business is just operating, you’re looking at tweaks, small tweaks, which optimise on performance and efficiencies. ‘But then you start stepping back and saying, “Well, hang on, what does our own model look like in 15 to 20 years’ time? And what are we doing about it today?” ‘We recently got the opportunity to present a White Paper to Makoto Uchida, our global CEO, on innovation and ideas that we had for the UK where we wanted to be the case 06 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
We’re about to launch five amazing new products and the current model works. It works for our dealers. Andrew Humberstone Managing director of Nissan Motor GB
James Batchelor is shown the new Nissan Ariya
