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Yesterday, at 1:30 p.m. Tokyo time, a long-standing desire of Carlos Ghosn was fulfilled. Ghosn\u2019s life work, the Renault-Nissan Group, can be called World\u2019s Largest Automaker, for the first half of the year, at least. The man who had similar urges, Volkswagen\u2019s Martin Winterkorn, now lives in infamy. His company became\u00a0world\u2019s largest last year, when Winterkorn was gone.\u00a0At halftime, Volkswagen was back in #2.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the Renault-Nissan Alliance reported\u00a0half-year sales of 5,268,079 units. A week earlier,\u00a0Volkswagen said in its monthly global sales report that it delivered 5,155,600 units in the first six months. Today after lunch,\u00a0Toyota published its 6 month sales and production results, and said it had sold\u00a05,129,000 units January through June. Ghosn\u2019s\u00a0Renault-Nissan Alliance was king of the hill.<\/p>\n

Of course, people at the Alliance were quick to allege that the title means absolutely nothing. An hour before the Alliance sent out its numbers yesterday, Nissan\u2019s chief of investor relations, Joji Tagawa, claimed in Yokohama that he doesn\u2019t \u201creally care whether we are number one, number two, or number three. That\u2019s not an important performance indicator. How can we leverage size is important.\u201d A little later, his boss Carlos Ghosn promised to \u201ccontinue to leverage our significant economies of scale and global market presence to deliver valuable synergies for our member companies this year, while maintaining a strong technology lineup and offering customers breakthrough electric models.\u201d<\/p>\n

And how important are sales anyway?\u00a0The final ranking of automakers is established once a year by the global automaker association OICA. OICA ranks automakers by production, not by sales. If you try to track OEMs by that yardstick, your work will be a little harder.<\/p>\n

Japanese OEMs traditionally publish sales and production data on a monthly basis. Other OEMs, such as Volkswagen, refuse to provide monthly production data. Yesterday, Volkswagen suddenly published a production number of 5.43 million for the first six months\u00a0as part of its half year financial data. Toyota said it made 5.29 million units in the same period. So where does that leave the Alliance? We don\u2019t know with certainty. Renault does report sales on a monthly basis, but refuses to release production data more often than once a year. Alliance members Nissan and Mitsubishi publish both sales and production monthly. One would think that a group that is proud of its synergies should be able to agree on a streamlined reporting structure, instead of forcing me to guess a half year production of around 5.35 million.<\/p>\n