PODCAST | Catching up with Kabelo Rabotho — head of Nissan SA

Nissan, the Japanese brand founded 89 years ago, can get playful while maintaining its membership in top 20 global automotive brands.

Seemingly this is prevalent of eastern brands as some of its peers are into humanoid robots, some into boats and motorcycles, while Nissan also dabbles with offbeat inventions such as bedroom slippers that autonomously park themselves under your bed.

This is the offshoot tech the company uses to research and refine vehicle-bound features, such as sharpening the self-parking of cars in the autonomous future. We reflected on some of these unorthodox technologies, including Shwii by Nissan during an interview with Kabelo Rabotho, of Nissan SA.

Shwii is an innovative collaboration between Nissan SA and satellite navigation app Waze to enable Nissan product owners to communicate with their cars using local languages such as isiZulu to navigate everywhere.

Rabotho ascended to the top spot of the local subsidiary when Nissan reorganised its SA operations under one region with Egypt, succeeding Mike Whitfield who has been with the brand since 1989 and now heads the Africa Regional business unit.

The incumbent MD, or Country Manager as preferred by the company, joined the company in 2016 as MD of marketing. His competencies were crafted though more than 25 years of local automotive industry experience, which included management stints at BMW and Toyota SA. He has been in product and brand management, sales and fleet management sales.

He says Nissan SA's targets for the next five years include achieving full plant capacity but with the economy’s downturn and effects of the recent coronavirus pandemic, vehicle sales have been struggling for all OEMs and Rabotho’s company sold 2,625 passenger models in July 2022.

The NP200 half-tonne LCV remains the company’s best seller with 1,213 units sold in the same month and 561 of the new Navara one-tonner were sold locally while 479 were imported last month. The R3bn investment for the manufacture of the Navara has so far led to about 7,000 units finding homes in SA and about 3,500 to export markets.

One of Rabotho’s many priorities is to ensure success for the company’s continental ambitions for the Navara through the 2018 establishment of the Nissan Navara assembly plant in Tema, Ghana. The Nissan plant in Tshwane provides semi-knock-down Navaras to the new plant in Tema in a new Ghana Automotive Development Policy. This includes satisfying the more than 45 African countries Nissan SA already supplies vehicles to in its bid to become the light commercial vehicle hub for the African market.

Still on products, we asked him about the thinking behind the discontinuation of the electric Leaf, an unusual decision given the global move to electric vehicles (EVs). Rabotho says the introduction of the Leaf back in November 2013 was pioneering but was part of ongoing research the company does. The strategy is to gear up to introduce e-POWER, a bridge to full electrification which the company feels is more suited to the needs of the SA market as it takes away the immediate need for infrastructure and addresses range anxiety issues. 

The plan is to kick off with e-POWER before introducing the latest generation of electric vehicles, and it will start with the e-POWER Qashqai within the next 12 months and ramp up with more models within the next 24 months, which could see the introduction the Ariya, the company’s new full-electric SUV and the Nissan Micra EV, both not yet confirmed at this stage. The new third-generation Nissan Qashqai is expected in SA within the next few weeks.

Commenting on women’s month, he says his company has set employment equity targets to be reached by 2025, prioritising the recruitment and empowerment of women at all levels, with a focus on the inclusion of women of colour. These targets include an increase in female representation at top management or executive level to 25% and an increase in overall female representation at both senior and middle management levels.