Osamu Suzuki, who led the Japanese automaker Suzuki Motor for more than four decades and transformed into a global powerhouse, died on Wednesday in Shizuoka Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo. He was 94.
Suzuki Motor said in a statement that the cause of his death, in a hospital, was malignant lymphoma.
Mr. Suzuki was president of Suzuki Motor from 1978 to 2000 and, after that, served off and on in other top roles with the company. His tenure of nearly half a century at the helm made him among the longest-serving leaders of any major automaker.
Under his leadership, Suzuki Motor grew from a relatively small company with sales of a few billion dollars annually to what it is today: a leading maker of small vehicles and motorcycles with revenues of more than $30 billion a year because of its strong position in overseas markets like India.
Mr. Suzuki, the fourth son in a farming family, was born on Jan. 30, 1930, in Gifu Prefecture, west of Tokyo. After obtaining a law degree from Chuo University in 1953, he worked at a bank until he met his future wife, Shoko Suzuki, a member of the automaker’s founding family. They married in the late 1950s and he took his wife’s family name, not an uncommon practice among prominent Japanese families.
Mr. Suzuki steadily rose through the executive ranks and became president two decades after joining the company in 1958.
During his tenure, Mr. Suzuki navigated Suzuki Motor through alliances with major automakers, including Volkswagen and General Motors. Those ultimately fell apart, and in more recent years Suzuki has deepened ties with Japan’s domestic leader, Toyota.
Rather than take on Japan’s larger automakers directly, Mr. Suzuki focused his company on producing small, low-cost vehicles. He then sought out markets overseas where demand was growing.
One of his most notable successes came when Suzuki entered India in the early 1980s through a partnership with the Indian government. Before their partnership, India reported meager sales of under 40,000 cars a year. But in 1983, when the country’s state-run carmaker, Maruti Udyog, opted to collaborate with Suzuki to produce the Maruti 800 — known as the “people’s car” — it became an enormous success. Suzuki’s cars took off, and today the company’s Indian subsidiary commands around 40 percent of the country’s passenger car market.
Under Maruti Suzuki in India, Mr. Suzuki enacted plans for increased equality in the workplace. He pushed for open-plan offices and uniforms for both assembly-line workers and executives.
As a leader, he was also known for his thriftiness; he lowered factory ceilings to save on air-conditioning and insisted on flying economy well into old age.
In 2000, Mr. Suzuki traded the role of president role for the more ceremonial title of chairman. But potential successors suffered ill health, and he returned to day-to-day control as chief executive in 2008 after a son-in-law, Hirotaka Ono, died of pancreatic cancer.
In 2016, Mr. Suzuki, who was 86 at the time, said he would give up his position as chief executive in response to a scandal over improper fuel economy tests on cars that the company sold in Japan. He stayed on as chairman. Later that year, his son Toshihiro Suzuki, a longtime executive at the company, took over as president.
Osamu Suzuki stepped down as chairman of Suzuki in 2021 but continued to serve as a senior adviser. He said at the time that he would make himself accessible to current management and that he was “full of life,” having played golf some four dozen times the previous year.
Suzuki Motor declined to provide information on survivors.
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