Nissan Motor, Japan’s third-largest carmaker, is likely to plunge into an operating loss for the first time since Carlos Ghosn took over as president of the sprawling industrial giant a decade ago, analysts are warning.

The predicted loss comes as the entire Japanese car industry is writhing in pain: US and Japanese consumers are retrenching with unexpected speed and emerging market growth in hotspots such as Russia and China has begun to wither alarmingly.

The dip into loss will be a profound reversal for Mr Ghosn and for the investors who have backed his once seemingly bulletproof management powers.

When he became president of Nissan in 1999, the company was on the verge of oblivion and required wholesale restructuring to make it viable again.

As the first non-Japanese chief executive of a Japanese blue chip, his success was touted as the ultimate clash of Western management style with the embedded culture of Japan Inc.

Analysts in Tokyo downgraded their forecasts for Nissan today, reversing their predictions of slim profits and warning investors to expect a prolonged two-year stint in the red.

Consensus forecasts, however, still hold that Nissan will make a modest profit of 80 billion yen (£620 million) in the current year.

Brokers said that the expected losses at Nissan — along with today’s forecast downgrades — arose from a growing sense of unease over the size of global inventories of unsold cars.

“Everyone has seen the satellite photographs showing airfields and docksides full of unsold cars, and the shoe has finally dropped,” one trader in Singapore said.

"Companies like Nissan, Toyota and Honda are not going to be able to sell any cars over the next few months unless they offload those inventories at knockdown prices, and that is going to hurt the bottom line.”

The trader added that Toyota’s recent profit warning had rattled most analysts’ assumptions about the state of the market and implied as yet invisible future blows to the carmakers’ profitability.

Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ analysts noted the continuing downward pressure placed on the Japanese carmakers by the strong yen: a stint of weakness this month proved to be a false dawn, and in trading today, the Japanese currency once again pushed higher into the Y88 range against the dollar.

Most large Japanese companies have based their profit forecasts for the current year on a yen-dollar exchange rate assumption of something near Y98.

Nissan is expected to make its grim slide into the red during the current financial year, which ends on March 31.

The company has already scythed into its workforce with job cuts at plants around the world: a quarter of its British workers were laid off recently, and, in common with other Japanese carmakers, virtually all of its temporary staff in Japan.

Nissan’s other cost-cutting measures include an indefinite four-day week scheme at the company’s plants in the US.

The forecast loss will mark a dramatic reversal of the company’s estimates, which were last updated in October and suggested that, despite faltering markets around the world, the company would make an operating profit of about Y270 billion.

Analysts told The Times that losses this year might amount to only a relatively shallow drop of about $300 million (£204.5 million).

Predictions in the Japanese press of an impending profit warning by Nissan hit the company’s shares by about 5 per cent in trading today.

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