Osamu Suzuki, mind of Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corporation since 1978 and the driving force behind India’s Maruti Suzuki, died on December 25, 2024. Overshadowed by Toyota, the Nissan-Renault play and the increase of China’s BYD, Suzuki was yet one of the great companies of the global auto industry.
Suzuki’s business, which was founded by his parents, has grown to become the tenth-largest manufacturer in the world and the largest in India, where Maruti Suzuki’s company holds more than 40 % of the business. Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor, called him the parents of mini-vehicles – the “people’s vehicle” of Japan.
In 1930, Suzuki was born in Gifu Prefecture as Osamu Matsuda. After graduating from university and working at a local bank, he married Shoko Suzuki, the princess of Michio Suzuki, the leader of Suzuki Motor Corporation. He was adopted into the community in accordance with Chinese customs, changed his name to Osamu Suzuki, and started working for the company in 1958.
Osamu Suzuki rose up the corporate ladder, becoming president in 2000, president and CEO in 1978, and top managing chairman in 1972. In 2021, he retired to become a senior consultant to the business. His brother, Toshihiro, is now president and CEO of Suzuki Motor.
Michio Suzuki founded the Suzuki Loom Works in the Pacific beach town of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, in 1909. He began working on small gasoline-powered passenger vehicles in 1937, a job that was halted by World War II, as he sought to diversify alongside Japan’s commercial economy.
After the battle, he turned to motorized bike and riders, changing the name of his business to Suzuki Motor Co, Ltd in 1954. The business introduced its first rider car the following month.
This story is comparable to Toyota Motor, which was founded in 1926 as Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. Toyota Motor, a 1933-founded car department, was founded in 1937.
Suzuki Motor had a lot of success creating the ultra-compact light cars known as the” Kei jidosha” ( Kei cars ) in Japanese. The Suzuki Fronte sedan, its leader, the Alto, and another passenger vehicles types have proved to be strong dealers in Japan and elsewhere.
Since its debut in 1979, The Alto has gone through nine publications. Suzuki Carry cabs, first introduced in 1961, are also common with farmers and people driving Japan’s small remote roads.
To meet laws, Kei vehicles, which include passenger cars, lighting vans and modest pickup trucks, may be no more than 3.4 meters long, 1.48 meters wide and 2.0 meters higher, and have an engine displacement of less than 660 cubic centimeters.
Suzuki Motor expanded into small cars with up to 1.8 liter of engine displacement for the highest-performance versions over the years, but Kei cars also make up the majority of its engine production and sales.
Into India
Suzuki, who was prepared to transfer Suzuki Motor elsewhere in the 1980s, was concerned that the US market might not stand up to direct competition from Toyota, Nissan, and Honda.
He jumped at the chance when an Indian group arrived in Japan looking for a business that would provide money and expertise to the country’s infant auto industry. No one else did.
In 1981, Suzuki Motor entered into a joint venture with Maruti Udyog, buying 26 % of the company from the American government. Beginning in December 1983, Suzuki began manufacturing light vehicles, and as the company expanded, it became a merged subsidiary.
Listed on the Indian stock market in 2003, Maruti Suzuki is then 54.27%-owned by Suzuki Motor.
Ravindra Chandra Bhargava, president of Maruti Suzuki, said in his remarks regarding his encounter with Osamu Suzuki that “without his vision and vision, his willingness to take a chance that no one else was willing to take, his deep and abiding passion for India, and his huge abilities as a teacher, the American automotive industry could not have become the powerhouse that it has become. Osamu San has improved the lives of millions of people in this nation.
Osamu Suzuki was a hands-on, penny-pinching manager who frequently visited his factories to monitor how things were going and eliminate inefficiency, even eliminating the need for unnecessary lighting and switching to less expensive paint. He made several trips to India each year, documenting the introduction of Japanese factory practices.
The severe discipline, to which many local workers were unaccustomed, eventually sparked violent worker unrest in the summer of 2012. More than 500 employees were fired, and the business persevered. Suzuki told India’s Business Today,” I don’t consider this a union-management labor issue, I term it a criminal act”.
But he also said,” From 1945, when Japan lost in World War II, until 1960, we also had labor troubles. In Japan, I also had labor issues. Each nation experiences labor difficulties in its own time, which may vary in timing.
Incidentally, while Maruti Suzuki gets all the attention, the much smaller Pak Suzuki Motors is also the largest auto company in Pakistan. It started assembling cars in Pakistan in 1982 as a joint venture with the Pakistani government.
Suzuki attempted to enter the US market through a partnership with GM, which made its first investment in the Japanese company in 1981 and increased its stake in the business to more than 20 % in 2001. However, the partnership fell apart as GM’s finances deteriorated.
In 2006, GM sold most of its stake back to Suzuki, in 2008 it sold the rest and, in 2009, it filed for bankruptcy. Suzuki stopped selling passenger cars in the US in 2012. Suzuki then turned to Volkswagen, which bought 19.9 % of the company in 2010. However, the two sides broke out, and Suzuki repurchased VW shares in 2015.
Suzuki started providing Toyota with compact cars that were rebranded and offered through Toyota dealerships the following year, leading to significant increases in unit sales. In 2-19, Toyota took a 4.9 % stake in Suzuki for 96 billion yen ( about US$ 910 million at the time ) and Suzuki buying 0.2 % of Toyota for half that amount.
The partnership continues to evolve, with coordinated marketing in Japan, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The two businesses made a deal in October 2024 that Suzuki would start making battery-powered electric SUVs for Toyota in Gujarat. Suzuki also makes hybrid vehicles.
Maruti Suzuki and the State of Gujarat reached an agreement last year to establish a new auto factory that will eventually produce one million vehicles annually. The fiscal year that runs until March 2029 is when operations are expected to begin.
In order to expand the production of electric vehicles, a fourth production line is planned at the company’s current factory in Gujarat. Scheduled to start operations in the year to March 2027, it will raise the facility’s annual production capacity from 750, 000 to one million vehicles. Gujarat’s total vehicle production should eventually reach two million vehicles.
In addition to the State of Haryana, construction on a new factory is underway. Work is anticipated to begin by the end of 2025 and by the 2028 annualized capacity will reach one million vehicles. In addition, the business is looking for a location in Haryana where it can set up a new factory that will have a one million vehicle annual capacity.
Maruti Suzuki’s total production capacity should increase from the current 2.35 million vehicles per year to 4 million, almost as many as the 4.3 million passenger cars sold by all automakers in India in 2024 if all of these plans are realized and older facilities retired.
Suzuki Motor also produces passenger cars in Asia in Indonesia and Thailand, but it intends to close its factory there because the country’s sales have been hampered by intensifying Chinese competition. The business has not yet provided specifics about plans to increase its investment in Indonesia this year. Suzuki withdrew from China’s auto market in 2018 but still makes motorcycles there.
In Europe, Suzuki makes passenger cars in Hungary, where it has almost 13 % of the market. Since 1991, Suzuki has invested more than$ 2 billion in Hungary. The Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency presented Magyar Suzuki with the Investors Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2024.
Suzuki makes open all-terrain vehicles ( dune buggies ) in the US state of Georgia. Because of their small size and light weight, it’s Kei cars are fatal traps in collisions with large American passenger cars and SUVs, and they have been restricted to farms or completely prohibited in a growing number of US states.
Suzuki is almost immune to Donald Trump’s planned tariffs and fierce competition in the world’s largest auto market, thanks to its low US and China sales, and its almost zero Chinese automakers ‘ presence in India, where they are almost entirely unaffected.
For the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025, Suzuki Motor forecasts a 4.5 % increase in consolidated sales to 5.6 trillion yen ($ 35.3 billion ) and an 11.4 % increase in operating profit to 550 billion yen ($ 3.5 billion ).
In comparison, Toyota is forecasting 2 % sales growth, a 19.7 % decline in operating profit and an operating margin of 9.8 %. Suzuki is also doing better than Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors and Subaru.
In terms of sales, Suzuki Motor was the 10th-largest automaker in the world at the start of 2024, according to market research firm Focus2Move. Company data show Suzuki selling 3.0 million passenger cars, compared with 3.7 million for 9th-ranked BYD and 9.7 million for top-ranked Toyota ( including its wholly-owned subsidiary Daihatsu Motor ). Suzuki is also the world’s eighth largest maker of motorcycles.
From January to November 2024, Suzuki Motor ( including its subsidiary Maruti Suzuki ) sold 670, 000 vehicles in Japan and 2.33 million elsewhere in the world, including 1.66 million in India.
In the financial year that ended in March 2024, Maruti Suzuki held the top spot in the Indian auto market, followed by Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia with nearly 20 %, Tata Motors with 14 %, and Mahindra &, Mahindra with 11 %, according to Statista data. MG ( owned by China’s SAIC ) had 1.3 %. Volvo ( owned by China’s Geely ) and BYD had less than 0.1 % combined.
India accounts for about 6 % of global passenger car sales that year, surpassing Japan in the former category in 2023. It is the third-largest national market for motor vehicles and fourth-largest in terms of passenger car sales worldwide. It will serve as Suzuki’s primary export market for the next ten years and be its largest market.
Road ahead
The headquarters of Suzuki Motor is still headquartered in Hamamatsu, a city with a population of nearly 800,000 and where other well-known Japanese companies reside, including Yamaha Corporation, a manufacturer of musical instruments, and Hamamatsu Photonics, an optical device manufacturer. In the nearby city of Iwata, Yamaha Motor has its head office, which includes motorcycle, outboard, and jet-propelled water scooter manufacturers.
A memorandum of understanding between Hamamatsu City and the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad ( IIT-Hyderabad )   ) was signed on December 26. It included arrangements for Indians to live and work in Hamamatsu, as well as for personnel exchange in science and engineering. It is the first such agreement between an IIT and a foreign government, according to IIT-Hyderabad Director Budaraju Srinivasa Murty.
The agreement comes after Suzuki Motor’s establishment of a 100%-owned subsidiary called Next Bharat Ventures IFSC Private Limited and a$ 40 million Next Bharat Venture Fund-1 in India in 2022 and the opening of the Suzuki Innovation Center at IIT Hyderabad in 2022. Bharat, deriving from Sanskrit, is another name for India.
Next Bharat Ventures invests in start-ups in the fields of agriculture, finance, supply chains and mobility through the Fund, and supports them with professional advice, networking and feasibility studies. The goal is to solve social issues and contribute to India’s economic growth. Next Bharat and Hamamatsu City have a parallel MOU signed.
President and CEO Toshihiro Suzuki says,” There are about 1.4 billion people in India, but we have only reached about 0.4 billion people … Through this]Next Bharat Ventures], we will connect with the’ Next Billion ‘ people of India, extending beyond mobility and becoming a part of India’s future story”. Responsible for his father’s legacy, he is driving it forward with gusto.
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