The yen is down — and Japanese car manufacturers are going to use that to their advantage, shipping more vehicles to North America.
Nissan and Honda are planning to increase shipments from Japan to their biggest market, the U.S. — signaling a possible rise in auto exports to America in the coming months, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With the yen in decline against the American dollar for nearly three years now, it's cheaper for Japanese auto makers to build cars at home and ship more of them out. That's precisely why Nissan will export 100,000 Rogue compact SUVs from its plant in southern Japan to North America, beginning in the spring of 2016, with plans to follow up every year thereafter. The Rogue's sales are up 36 percent in the U.S. from January through June of 2015.
Honda plans on exporting 40,000 Fit subcompacts to North America through March 2016.
This marks quite a shift for Honda, which according to the Wall Street Journal, made about 21 percent of its vehicles in Japan last year and only exported three percent of that. The latter percentage is clearly on its way up, due to the weaker yen.
"We have pushed for each region to be independent by being capable of producing, selling and developing vehicles as well as procuring parts locally," said Honda CEO Takahiro Hachigo to the media earlier this week, as reported by the Journal. "Now what we want to do is to make use of the production capacity we've built regionally in a more global manner."
The production lines at Honda and Nissan are going to be extra busy.
