Nissan Motor Company — a major multinational — is planning to abandon vehicle production at its Wuhan, China plant by March 31, 2026. Despite building a new facility capable of producing 300,000 vehicles a year — including the much-hyped Ariya electric car and the X-Trail SUV — reality has hit hard: they barely managed to produce 10,000 units annually.

Why would a major corporation, armed with decades of experience and massive resources, miscalculate so badly? It’s simple: competition, particularly from domestic Chinese automakers, has become fierce.

Domestic Chinese car companies are outcompeting the foreign giants on their own turf. Nissan’s “solution”? Cut and run. Shut down production and leave workers and suppliers to deal with the wreckage.

And the cost of this failure is reputed to be 700 to 750 billion yen — about five billion U.S. dollars.