He had played 47 rounds of golf in the past year. Osamu Suzuki said this when he retired in 2021 at the age of 91. He had been at the top of Suzuki Motor for more than forty years, and golf had kept him fit. He also said at his farewell that he would remain available for advice. He was so entwined with the car company. Osamu Suzuki died of cancer on December 25 at the age of 94.
Osamu was not born with a golden accelerator pedal under his feet, he was only given the name Suzuki when he was an adult. The future industrialist was born on January 30, 1930 as Osamu Matsuki in the Japanese countryside and worked his way up.
He started his career at a bank and committed himself to the car manufacturer for life when he married a granddaughter of founder Michio Suzuki. Osamu was given his wife’s surname – not unusual in Japanese entrepreneurial families – so that even without sons, succession by a Suzuki was guaranteed.
In the almost half century that Osamu Suzuki was at the top of the company, he provided the car brand with an image that matched the character of the boss: economical and solid. To save on air conditioning costs, he lowered ceilings in factories and flew economy class until his old age.
This sobriety is also characteristic of Suzuki cars. Great value for little money, wrote NRCcar journalist Bas van Putten talked about the latest Swift in May. Van Putten clearly had a soft spot for the boring Swift, with its “touching clumsiness”, but also noted that Suzukis could hardly be taken seriously anymore due to their gap with the spirit of the times.
Hierarchical culture
Osamu Suzuki may partly be blamed for this with his conservative leadership style. “If I listened to everyone, it would be too slow,” he wrote in his memoirs. His son would later say, at the time of the emissions scandal that also occurred at Suzuki, that Suzuki’s hierarchical culture made it difficult for employees to expose problems.
Yet the Suzuki family business owes a lot to his adopted son. The company that started with the production of looms, reached the top of car and motorcycle manufacturers under Osamu’s leadership, with a turnover of more than 33 billion euros in 2023.
Osamu Suzuki saw opportunities in countries where other manufacturers missed them. For example, in the early 1980s he acquired a quarter of the Indian state-owned company Maruti Udyog, now merged with Suzuki, and made the Maruti 800 so popular that the waiting period at one point had increased to three years. Maruti Suzuki still has a 40 percent market share in the Indian car market.
In the Netherlands, the Suzuki Swift was especially popular as a dirt-cheap minicar. Best-selling color: gray. But probably the most endearment still comes from the tiny Carry van, which was designed so compact because it qualified for Japanese tax breaks.
As successful as the deal with Maruti was, some other collaborations under Osamu Suzuki were unfortunate. The dreamed marriage with Volkswagen, which bought a fifth of the Suzuki shares in 2009, ended in a contested divorce. Suzuki felt that Volkswagen was interfering too much with its business operations, while the Japanese drove Volkswagen into the spotlight by purchasing diesel engines from Fiat instead of from the German partner. Ultimately, Suzuki managed to buy back its shares.
Osamu Suzuki has changed hats several times since he rose to the top of the company in the 1970s. In 2000 he stepped down as CEO to continue to keep a big finger in the pie as chairman of the supervisory board. When his son-in-law, the ideal successor, died and profits were under pressure, he took over again at the end of 2008 at the age of 78.
In 2016, when Suzuki, like other manufacturers, was found to have used questionable emissions tests, Osamu Suzuki had no choice but to back down. He handed over daily management to his son Toshihiro, but remained chairman of the board until he announced his retirement in 2020.
How much influence Osamu Suzuki still had behind the scenes in the last few years – even after the age of ninety he still went to the office every day – is not known. But there was undoubtedly a serious core to the jokes he himself had made as CEO. When asked how long he would stay with the company, he replied: “Until I die.”