After almost half a century of trying to reclaim its glory days, Nissan South Africa (NSA) has given up the fight. Its Japanese parent announced last week that it plans to sell the NSA vehicle assembly plant in Rosslyn, Tshwane, to Chinese company Chery. It expects the deal to be concluded midyear.
NSA will become an importer. Unlike General Motors (GM), which disinvested totally in 2017, taking Chevrolet and other brands with it, Nissan’s dealer network will continue to sell and service vehicles.
The Navara bakkie range, Rosslyn’s only product, will be shipped in from Thailand. The company says other vehicles that are already imported will still be sold and more models will be launched this year.
It’s a sad ending for a pillar of the local motor industry that was the market leader in the 1970s. Figures from industry association Naamsa show NSA sold 15,085 vehicles in 2025. That’s not many more than Toyota sells in one month. Exports totalled 7,336 — fewer than some competitors ship out in a month.
Rosslyn built fewer than 20,000 Navaras last year, an unsustainable number in a plant designed for 70,000 but with potential capacity of more than 100,000. A R3bn Japanese investment in 2019 was supposed to future-proof a plant that had lived hand-to-mouth for many years.
Falling demand for its own cars had persuaded Nissan to build those of other brands at its Rosslyn plant — most notably the Fiat Uno and Renault Sandero — to keep production lines ticking.
Nissan’s cars suffered from a weak corporate image. Products such as the Patrol 4x4 and Maxima saloon, named car of the year in 1992, couldn’t match the market traction of rivals. Successive attempts to introduce the Infiniti luxury brand, Nissan’s equivalent of Toyota’s Lexus, failed.
Ballooning imports of Chinese cars are causing major headaches for the local motor industry and the government is desperate for some of them to be built here
Increasingly, consumers viewed Nissan as a bakkie company — a view reinforced when the 2019 investment turned Rosslyn into a bakkie-only plant. The intention was to add Navara production to that of the veteran Hardbody one-tonner and smaller NP200. The latter was the successor to the hugely successful Nissan half-tonner known as The Champ.
Things didn’t go according to plan. Navara production should have started in 2020 but was delayed by the Covid pandemic until mid-2021. Hardbody production, which executives had said would continue until 2024, ended in November 2021. Then, in 2024, came the killer blow when plans for an NP200 replacement were scrapped and production of the existing model, which accounted for about half of Rosslyn’s production, was terminated.
There was talk of an alternative model but that would have taken up to four years. Once Nissan Japan announced in 2025 that it would close some plants to cut costs, Rosslyn’s fate was sealed.
This will challenge Nissan’s Africa strategy. Rosslyn is the headquarters and “mother plant” for all the group’s activities on the continent and has supplied Navara kits for assembly in other countries. These will now be supplied from Thailand. Nissan Africa president Jordi Vila says NSA will remain the Africa HQ for now but Egypt, where Nissan retains manufacturing operations, is a likely successor.
Vila says Navara production is expected to end in May. The plant once employed well over 2,000 workers. Now there are about 800 and Vila says about 700 of those will be employed by Chery “on substantially similar terms and conditions as today”. He hopes some component suppliers will enjoy similar continuity.
Chery has been linked to Rosslyn for some time since admitting its interest in local manufacture. Ballooning imports of Chinese cars are causing major headaches for the local motor industry and the government is desperate for some of them to be built here.
BAIC (Beijing Automotive Industry Corp) is the only Chinese maker to have started local manufacture but its primary activity so far has been the assembly of imported kits. But now Foton, part of the BAIC group, is preparing for local production of bakkies and it’s thought these, along with BAIC’s own output, may provide the volume needed for actual manufacture.
If so, Chery has an even stronger case. The Chery brand sold 25,304 vehicles in South Africa last year. Three other brands in the Chery group — Jetour, Omoda and Jaecoo — are also available. Add their combined sales of 21,700 and the group total approaches 50,000.
It may not be feasible for all of them to be made here but Chery’s South African ambition is clear.
It’s too soon to say, as some have, that Chery’s intended Rosslyn purchase signals a local motor industry revolution. When GM disinvested in 2017, it was predicted that the dam would burst and others would follow. It’s taken nine years for Nissan to do so.
Will there be another? There have been unsubstantiated rumours about Mercedes-Benz South Africa, whose East London assembly plant, which manufactures C-Class cars primarily for export, is operating well below capacity, particularly after the US imposed a 25% tariff on imported cars last year. A Chinese company has expressed interest in using this spare capacity for its own vehicles.
However, the German parent company has been a fierce supporter of the South African motor industry since its first cars were built here almost 70 year ago and has expressed no doubts about East London’s future.
