Osamu Suzuki, who ran Suzuki Motor Corp. , known for its minicars and motorcycles, for several decades and led the company’s global expansion, has died. He is 94 years old.
Suzuki died of lymphoma on Dec. 25, the company said in a statement.
Born Osamu Matsuda, Suzuki married into the circle of relatives after whom the Hamamatsu, Japan-based automaker is named. During his long tenure, he formed partnerships with General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG to sell cars in North America and Europe and leveraged Suzuki Motor’s expertise in small cars to gain a dominant share of the Indian market.
“If I were to listen to everybody, it would make things too slow,” Suzuki said of his leadership philosophy in “I’m a Small-Business Boss,” a Japanese-language memoir published in 2009. “Never stop, or else you lose.”
Suzuki’s 28 years as president, spread over two terms, made him the longest-serving executive at a global automaker. He passed the presidency to his son in June 2015 and took over as lead CEO, a dual name he held for a year before resigning as CEO following a lie about fuel economy. The company admitted to employing unapproved strategies to control the fuel consumption of its cars in Japan, leading to a sharp sell-off in the company’s shares and a wave of takeovers.
The automaker sold about 3. 2 million cars worldwide in the fiscal year ending March 2024, leading Japanese automaker and global No. 1 Toyota Motor Corp. , according to data compiled by Bloomberg. More than a portion of those cars were sold in India, where the company’s Indian subsidiary, Maruti Suzuki, owns the majority.
Osamu Suzuki, a former bank employee, got his start in the automotive industry through his arranged marriage to Shoko Suzuki, granddaughter of Michio Suzuki, founder of Suzuki Motor’s predecessor, a loom manufacturer, in 1909. Osamu Suzuki took his wife’s name, so it is Japanese tradition that there is no male heir in the circle of relatives of the business.
He joined the company in 1958, three years after the launch of his first motorcycle, the ColledaCOX 125cc 4-stroke and the Suzulight 360cc 2-stroke, which helped usher in the mini-vehicle era in Japan.
He held various management positions before becoming president in 1978. The following year, he made his first mark by introducing the Alto mini car to Japan. A complete success, this model is characterized by having resurrected the national minicar market.
Betting that the company could gain a foothold in small markets ignored by larger competitors, he led Suzuki Motor’s expansion through building production bases from Pakistan to Hungary.
In 1981, Detroit-based GM, then the world’s largest automaker, agreed to acquire a stake in Suzuki Motor, which was seeking to expand in North America and Europe. GM would later own up to 20% of Suzuki Motor after doubling its stake in 2001. Following five consecutive quarterly losses, the American automaker began selling its Suzuki Motor shares for cash in 2006 and completed the divestment in 2008. GM filed for bankruptcy the following year, in the midst of the global currency crisis.
Following the dissolution of the alliance with GM, Suzuki Motor agreed to a merger with the German group VW, which in 2010 owned a 19. 9% stake.
The alliance became acrimonious after VW described Suzuki Motor as a “partner” in an annual report, and Suzuki accused VW of damaging its honor by alleging it had breached its partnership agreement by purchasing engines from Italy’s Fiat SpA. The partnership ended in September 2015 when Suzuki Motor bought back VW shares worth $3. 8 billion.
Osamu Suzuki said the company would value its independence in its long-term relationships with other automakers. Suzuki formed an equity alliance with Toyota in 2019.
His greatest achievement was considered his expansion into India. He came across a newspaper article about the Indian government’s search for a partner in car manufacturing, and in 1982 he met with a team from the South Asian country at a hotel in Tokyo.
Suzuki Motor has agreed to set up a company with the Indian government on the outskirts of New Delhi and acquired a 26% stake in state-owned carmaker Maruti Udyog. The following year, the company introduced the Maruti 800 small car, which is so popular that waiting times to purchase it can be up to 3 years.
Maruti, now part of Suzuki Motor, temporarily became India’s largest car manufacturer; its market share was eroded by Hyundai Motor Co. and Tata Motors Ltd.
Suzuki is also now one of the world’s leading motorcycle manufacturers, promoting around 1. 9 million units in the 12 months ended March 31. The logo is known for winning world titles.
Osamu Suzuki was born Jan. 30, 1930, in Gero, a city in central Japan’s Gifu prefecture. He was the fourth son in a farming family. Aspiring to be a politician, he worked part-time as a junior high-school teacher and night guard while completing his degree in law at Chuo University in Tokyo, according to a March 2009 article in Nikkei BP magazine.
After graduating from Chuo in 1953, he worked in a bank until his marriage led him to enroll in the family business.
After stepping down as president in 2000, he became president and CEO of Suzuki Motor. He returned to the presidency at the age of 78 in December 2008, when Suzuki Motor expected its first profit decline in 8 years as the global recession and tightened lending weighed on auto demand.
“In the face of an extremely difficult business environment, I have to stand at the forefront,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the past 30 years, a sense of complacency has spread throughout the company. As the one who brought the company to where it is, I have to correct this and lead the company until the economy improves.”
Suzuki felt a similar sense of responsibility for the company’s faulty fuel-testing practices in Japan, apologizing to a room of reporters in 2016 as his son and president, Toshihiro Suzuki, stood beside him. Suzuki Motor’s “top-down culture” made it difficult for junior employees to approach management with testing concerns, Toshihiro Suzuki said.
Osamu Suzuki resigned from his name as CEO and accepted a 40% pay cut, but he remained chairman, a position he held until 2021, just as the arrival of electric cars was beginning to seriously shake the world’s existing automakers.
At the briefing in which he announced his retirement, Suzuki expressed satisfaction with his control of the company and added that he would “continue to be available for advice. ” He also confided to the audience that he was “full of life,” having played golf 47 times over the past year.
He and his wife had three children.