Osamu Suzuki, who ran Suzuki Motor Corp for five decades, dies at 94

By Yuki Hagiwara

Osamu Suzuki, who ran Suzuki Motor Corp., known for its minicars and motorcycles, across several decades and drove the company’s global expansion, has died. He was 94.

Suzuki died of lymphoma on Dec. 25, the company said in a statement.

Born Osamu Matsuda, Suzuki married into the family that gave the Hamamatsu, Japan-based automaker its name. During his long tenure, he formed partnerships with General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG to sell vehicles in North America and Europe and leveraged Suzuki Motor’s expertise in small cars to build a dominant market share in India.

“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 more than 28 years as president across two terms made him the longest-serving head of a global automaker. He passed the presidency to his son in June 2015 and assumed a role as chairman and chief executive officer, a dual title he held onto for a year before stepping down as CEO in the wake of a fuel-economy misstatement. The company admitted to using unapproved methods to test the fuel-mileage of its vehicles in Japan, spurring a sharp selloff in the company’s stock and a wave of management departures.

Global reach

The automaker sold about 3.2 million vehicles worldwide in the fiscal year that ended in March 2024, trailing Japan’s dominant carmaker and world No. 1 Toyota Motor Corp., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. More than half of those vehicles were sold in India, where the company’s Indian unit, Maruti Suzuki, holds the lion’s share.

A former bank employee, Osamu Suzuki got his start in the automotive business thanks to his arranged marriage to Shoko Suzuki, a granddaughter of Michio Suzuki, who founded Suzuki Motor’s predecessor, a loom manufacturer, in 1909. Osamu Suzuki took his wife’s surname, as is the Japanese custom when there are no male heirs to a family business.

He joined the company in 1958, three years after the debut of its first motorcycle, the ColledaCOX 125cc 4-cycle, and the Suzulight 360cc 2-cycle car, which helped usher in Japan’s minivehicle age.

He served in several management roles before becoming president in 1978. The next year he made his first mark by introducing the Alto minicar in Japan. A big hit, the model was credited with resurrecting the domestic market for minicars.

Betting that the company could establish a foothold in small markets neglected by larger rivals, he led Suzuki Motor’s overseas expansion by building production bases from Pakistan to Hungary.

Alliances formed

In 1981, Detroit-based GM, then the world’s biggest carmaker, agreed to buy a stake in Suzuki Motor, which was seeking to expand in North America and Europe. GM would later hold as much as 20 per cent of Suzuki Motor after doubling its interest in 2001. Reeling from five straight quarterly losses, the US automaker began selling its Suzuki Motor shares for cash in 2006 and completed the divestment in 2008. GM filed for bankruptcy the following year amid the global financial crisis.

After the GM alliance was dissolved, Suzuki Motor agreed to a tie-up with Germany’s VW, which bought a 19.9 per cent stake in 2010.

That alliance descended into acrimony after VW described Suzuki Motor as an “associate” in an annual report, and Suzuki accused VW of disparaging its honor by alleging it had violated their partnership agreement by buying engines from Italy’s Fiat SpA. The partnership ended in September 2015 when Suzuki Motor bought back VW’s $3.8 billion of shares.

Osamu Suzuki said the company would value its independence in future dealings with other automakers. Suzuki formed a capital alliance with Toyota in 2019.

His greatest achievement was often considered to be his expansion into India. He came across a newspaper article about the Indian government’s search for an automaking partner and in 1982 met with a team from the South Asian nation in a Tokyo hotel.

Suzuki Motor agreed to set up a venture with the Indian government outside New Delhi and acquired a 26 per cent stake in the state-owned carmaker Maruti Udyog. The next year, the venture rolled out the Maruti 800 small car, which was so popular that waiting times to purchase it stretched as long as three years.

Maruti, now a unit of Suzuki Motor, quickly became the biggest carmaker in India, though its market share has been eroded by Hyundai Motor Co. and Tata Motors Ltd.

Suzuki today is also one of the top global manufacturers of motorcycles, selling around 1.9 million units in the 12 months ended March 31. The brand has become well-known for winning world titles.

President twice

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 went to work at a bank until his marriage brought him into the family business.

After stepping down as president in 2000, he became Suzuki Motor’s chairman and chief executive officer. He returned as president at age 78 in December 2008, when Suzuki Motor was expecting its first profit decline in eight years as the global recession and tighter lending weighed on car 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 ceded his title as CEO and accepted a 40 per cent pay cut but remained as chairman, a title he held until 2021, just as the advent of electric cars started to roil the world’s legacy automakers in earnest.

At the briefing at which he announced his retirement, Suzuki expressed satisfaction with the company’s management while adding that he would “continue to be easily accessible for advice.” He also assured the audience that he was “full of life,” having played golf 47 times over the previous year.

He and his wife had three children.