A resurgence in brand confidence, fueled by refreshed products, lifted Nissan Group’s U.S. sales 8.7 percent last year.

It’s an optimistic sign in a key market for the Japanese automaker which suffered its largest annual percentage decline in 2020.

The Nissan division sold 919,086 vehicles in 2021, up 12 percent from the year earlier. Infiniti sales, meanwhile, tumbled 26 percent to 58,553 vehicles last year.

There’s greater demand for Nissan vehicles because the brand is getting stronger, Judy Wheeler, Nissan division vice president of sales and regional operations in the U.S., told Automotive News.

“We started the year with such a bang,” Wheeler said.

That is until the global auto industry got walloped by semiconductor and other supply chain shortages.

In 2021, Nissan lost about 228,000 units of production in North America because of the chip shortage, according to data from AutoForecast Solutions.

“We continue to work our way through it, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel on that,” Wheeler said.

Nissan’s chip supply has been improving each quarter since last fall. Wheeler expects the crisis to ebb “in the back half” of 2022.

Despite the challenges, Nissan soldiered on with its multiyear product reboot that took Nissan’s lineup from among the industry’s oldest to one of its freshest.

Last year saw updates to several key models including the Pathfinder, Frontier and Infiniti QX60.

Nissan last year plunged into digital retailing, introducing an e-commerce platform. More than 600 dealers — more than half of Nissan’s U.S. retail network — have signed up for the [email protected] program.

Dealer adoption of the program “continues to get stronger and stronger each day,” Wheeler said.

Brands: Nissan down 17% in the fourth quarter and up 12% for 2021; Infiniti down 47% in the fourth quarter and 26% for 2021.

Notable nameplates: Nissan Frontier, up 114% in the fourth quarter; Pathfinder, up 13%; Altima, down 31%; Rogue, down 16%; Infiniti QX50, down 65%; Q50, down 27%.

Incentives: $1,764 per vehicle, down 59% from a year earlier, TrueCar says.

Average transaction price: $31,921, up 10.5% from a year earlier, according to TrueCar.

Did you know? 2021 was the best-ever year for Nissan Kicks sales (82,960) since the vehicle launched in June 2018.