Osamu Suzuki, head 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 drama and the rise of China’s BYD, Suzuki was nevertheless one of the great entrepreneurs of the global auto industry.
Suzuki built the company established by his father into the tenth largest automaker in the world and the largest in India, where subsidiary Maruti Suzuki has more than 40% of the market. Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota Motor, called him the father of mini-vehicles – the “people’s car” of Japan.
Suzuki was born Osamu Matsuda in Gifu Prefecture in 1930. After graduating from university and working at a local bank, he married Shoko Suzuki, the daughter of Michio Suzuki, the founder of Suzuki Motor Corporation. Adopted into the family in accordance with Japanese custom, he changed his name to Osamu Suzuki and joined the company in 1958.
Climbing up the management ladder, Osamu Suzuki was appointed senior managing director in 1972, president and CEO in 1978, and chairman in 2000. In 2021, he retired to become a senior advisor to the company. His son, Toshihiro, is currently president and CEO of Suzuki Motor.
Michio Suzuki founded the Suzuki Loom Works in the Pacific coast village of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, in 1909. Looking to diversify along with Japan’s industrial economy, he began working on compact gasoline-powered passenger cars in 1937, a project interrupted by World War II.
After the war, he turned to motorized bicycles and motorcycles, changing the name of his company to Suzuki Motor Co, Ltd in 1954. The following year, the company launched its first passenger car.
This history parallels that of Toyota Motor, which started as Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in 1926. An auto division established in 1933 became Toyota Motor in 1937.
Suzuki Motor had considerable success with the ultra-compact light vehicles called kei jidosha (Kei cars) in Japanese. The Suzuki Fronte sedan, its successor, the Alto, and other passenger car models have proved to be strong sellers in Japan and overseas.
The Alto going through nine editions since its introduction in 1979. Suzuki Carry pickups, first introduced in 1961, are still popular with farmers and others driving Japan’s narrow rural roads.
To meet regulations, Kei cars, which include passenger cars, light vans and small pickup trucks, must be no more than 3.4 meters long, 1.48 meters wide and 2.0 meters high, and have an engine displacement of less than 660 cubic centimeters.
Over the years, Suzuki Motor expanded into compact cars with engine displacements of up to 1.8 liters for the highest-performance models, but Kei cars still account for the majority of its auto production and sales.
Into India
By the 1980s, Osamu Suzuki was ready to take Suzuki Motor overseas but was afraid that it might not survive direct competition with Toyota, Nissan and Honda in the US market.
So when a delegation from India showed up in Japan looking for a company willing to contribute capital and expertise to its infant auto industry, he jumped at the chance. No one else did.
In 1981, Suzuki Motor entered into a joint venture with Maruti Udyog, buying 26% of the company from the Indian government. Production of light vehicles began in December 1983, and as the business grew, Suzuki bought more shares until the renamed Maruti Suzuki became a consolidated subsidiary.
Listed on the Indian stock market in 2003, Maruti Suzuki is now 54.27%-owned by Suzuki Motor.
Reflecting on his experience with Osamu Suzuki, Ravindra Chandra Bhargava, chairman of Maruti Suzuki, stated that “Without his vision and foresight, his willingness to take a risk that no one else was willing to take, his deep and abiding love for India, and his immense capabilities as a teacher, I believe the Indian automobile industry could not have become the powerhouse that it has become. Millions of us in this country are living better lives because of Osamu San.”
Osamu Suzuki was a hands-on, penny-pinching manager who frequently toured his factories to keep an eye on operations and eliminate inefficiency, to the point of getting rid of unnecessary lighting and switching to cheaper paint. He visited India several times a year, monitoring 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 workers were let go and the company moved on. 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. So I have also experienced labor problems (in Japan). The timing may be different, but each country goes through labor trouble in its own time.”
Incidentally, while Maruti Suzuki gets all the attention, the much smaller Pak Suzuki Motors is also the largest auto company in Pakistan. A joint venture with the Pakistani government, it began assembling cars in Pakistan in 1982.
Suzuki tried to enter the US market in partnership with GM, which first invested in the Japanese company in 1981 and increased its stake 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. In 2012, Suzuki stopped selling passenger cars in the US. Suzuki then turned to Volkswagen, which bought 19.9% of the company in 2010. But the two fell out and Suzuki bought back the shares owned by VW in 2015.
The following year, Suzuki began supplying Toyota with compact cars that were rebranded and sold through Toyota dealerships, which led to large 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. In October 2024, the two companies agreed that Suzuki would supply Toyota with battery-powered electric SUVs manufactured at Suzuki’s factory in Gujarat starting this year. Suzuki also makes hybrid vehicles.
Last year, Maruti Suzuki announced an agreement with the State of Gujarat to build a new auto factory that should eventually produce one million vehicles per year. Operations are scheduled to commence in the fiscal year to March 2029.
A fourth production line is planned at the company’s existing factory in Gujarat with a view toward expanding electric vehicle production. 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. Total vehicle production in Gujarat should eventually reach two million vehicles.
A new factory in the State of Haryana is also under construction, with operations expected to start by the end of 2025 and annual capacity scheduled to reach one million vehicles by 2028. Meanwhile, the company is looking for a place to build another factory in Haryana that will also have an annual capacity of one million vehicles.
If and when all these plans are realized and older facilities retired, Maruti Suzuki’s total production capacity should rise 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.
In Asia, Suzuki Motor also manufactures passenger cars in Indonesia and Thailand, but it plans to close its factory in Thailand, where intensifying Chinese competition has depressed sales. The company plans to increase its investment in Indonesia this year but has not yet announced specifics. 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. Suzuki has invested more than 2 billion euros in Hungary since 1991. In February 2024, Magyar Suzuki received an Investors Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency.
Suzuki makes open all-terrain vehicles (dune buggies) in the US state of Georgia. Its Kei cars have had their use restricted to farms or have been banned outright in a growing list of US states because their small size and light weight make them death traps in a collision with large American passenger cars and SUVs.
Minimal sales in the US and China make Suzuki nearly immune both to Donald Trump’s planned tariffs and the ferocious competition in the world’s largest auto market, while the near-zero presence of Chinese automakers in India gives it a virtual free hand there.
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 the first eleven months of 2024, Suzuki Motor was the world’s 10th largest automaker in terms of vehicles sold, according to market consulting 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.
Data from Statista show Maruti Suzuki with just over 40% of the Indian auto market in the financial year ended March 2024, followed by Hyundai Motor and its subsidiary Kia with nearly 20%, Tata Motors with 14% and Mahindra & Mahindra with 11%. MG (owned by China’s SAIC) had 1.3%. Volvo (owned by China’s Geely) and BYD had less than 0.1% combined.
India is the world’s third-largest national market for motor vehicles and fourth-largest for passenger cars, having overtaken Japan in the former category in 2023 and accounting for about 6% of global passenger car sales that same year. For the coming decade, it will not only be Suzuki’s largest market but also its primary export base.
Road ahead
Suzuki Motor is still headquartered in Hamamatsu, which is now a city with a population of nearly 800,000 and also the home of other prominent Japanese companies including musical instrument maker Yamaha Corporation and optical device manufacturer Hamamatsu Photonics. The head office of motorcycle, outboard motor and jet-propelled water scooter maker Yamaha Motor is located in the adjacent city of Iwata.
On December 26, the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT-Hyderabad) and Hamamatsu City signed a memorandum of understanding providing for personnel exchange in science and engineering, collaboration in academic and industrial R&D, and arrangements for Indians to live and work in Hamamatsu. According to IIT-Hyderabad Director Budaraju Srinivasa Murty, it is the first such agreement between an IIT and a foreign government.
The agreement follows the launch of the Suzuki Innovation Center at IIT Hyderabad in 2022 and, in July 2024, Suzuki Motor’s establishing of a 100%-owned subsidiary called Next Bharat Ventures IFSC Private Limited and a $40 million Next Bharat Venture Fund-1 in India. 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 idea is to solve social problems and contribute to the further development of India. Next Bharat has signed its own parallel MOU with Hamamatsu City.
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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