Nissan Chief Denies Report That He Plans to Step Down Early TOKYO - The chief executive of Nissan Motor, Carlos Ghosn, said Friday that while he was not thinking of stepping down from his post anytime soon, the Japanese automaker had succession plans in place to select the next chief from within its ranks. Nissan shares fell more than 2 percent at one point Friday after a Bloomberg report that Mr. Ghosn, 58, was considering stepping down before the company's next business plan starts, or in about five years. "Talking about stepping down in five years is frankly not a topic of particular actuality now," said Mr. Ghosn, who has been the head of Nissan since 2001. When you're C.E.O., you have to have two conditions: first, shareholders need to trust you and want you to head your company. The second is that you need to feel the motivation to do the job. So, as long as both are reunited, you continue to do the job. And today, they are reunited," he said. Nissan's current six-year business plan runs until March 2017. Mr. Ghosn is one of the most visible corporate chieftains in Japan. He is credited with turning a near-bankrupt Nissan into one of the world's most profitable car companies. In the interview Friday, he noted that his mandate as a member of Nissan's board was not up for renewal until June of next year. He added that he would be up for election for another two-year term in 2015, and at the end of that term he would be 63 years old. "These kinds of things are usually discussed at shareholders" meetings where your mandate is being renewed," he said. So we still have time in front of us. The Brazilian-born Frenchman, who has a triple role of heading Nissan, its French partner Renault, and the Renault-Nissan alliance, repeated his long-held stance that he would prefer a Japanese national to lead Nissan when he does step down. Nissan and Renault has a pool of talent from which to select his successor, he said, indicating there would be no external search for his replacement. Mr. Ghosn is the second longest-serving chief executive of a Japanese automaker, after the octogenarian Osamu Suzuki, who has led Suzuki Motor Corporation since 1978. Despite a year marked by supply chain disruptions after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a historically strong yen and a teetering European economy, Nissan posted an operating profit margin of 5.8 percent in the year that ended in March. The company's performance was due to brisk sales as it outperformed domestic rivals including Toyota and Honda. Nissan - like Toyota and Honda - is scaling back production in Japan, where a strong yen trading at about ¥80 to the U.S. dollar has kept its domestic operations unprofitable. Nissan said it would close one production line at its Oppama factory, south of Tokyo, in July. The closing would reduce the company's total production capacity in Japan about 15 percent, to 1.16 million vehicles a year. Mr. Ghosn repeated Nissan's commitment to continue producing one million vehicles a year in Japan for now, but added that could change if the yen stayed at current "unbelievably" strong levels. "We are still keeping, as much as we can," he said, "to the one million commitment that we made, hoping that at a certain point in time, the headwinds represented by the strength of the yen will be a little bit less strong."