Nissan will invest 100 billion yen (± €650 million) in Ampere, the future electric daughter of the Renault Group, planned to go IPO at the beginning of 2024. It will own less than 10% of the new company.

According to the Japanese daily newspaper Yomijuri, the investment amount has been decided and will be announced next week. The ousting of Nissan’s number two, Ashwani Gupta, a notoriously cool lover of the Alliance with Renault, has accelerated things at Nissan headquarters.

Ampere has been valued between 8 and 10 billion euros when it goes public, meaning that Nissan will have less than 10%. When the new Alliance cooperation was sketched in February, the Japanese were still talking about a 15% stake.

According to Yomijuri, Nissan will have a representative on the Ampere board and participate in creating new technologies or lend some of its own technologies, but with restrictions on the patents and licenses, as previously discussed.

The other Alliance partner, Mitsubishi, has also confirmed its participation in Ampere, but until now, no further details have been communicated.

IPO in 2024

Ampere will assemble all electric activities of the Renault Group and aims at 30% growth annually for the next eight years. On the other hand, cost reduction is one of the major issues: 40% per car for the new generation of ‘true’ BEVs, to be produced in a lapse of less than ten hours per vehicle.

The Renault Group board has formed a committee presided by Group president Jean-Dominique Senard to follow up on the IPO scheduled in the first months of 2024. “The project advances; we noted the interest of several investors, like Qualcomm or Nissan,” says Luca de Meo, future CEO of Ampere but also CEO of the Renault Group.

“It’s also important that we remain the biggest shareholder so that we will have a fairly large free float. Remember that Porsche held 10% of free float when it went IPO; we will have a higher percentage,” explains de Meo. Some sources think about 20 to 25%.