NEW DELHI: If anyone can stake claim to putting India on four wheels and producing the people’s car Maruti 800, it is Osamu Suzuki, known for his hard-nosed business acumen as much as his no-nonsense attitude and frugal mindset.
Suzuki (senior advisor, Suzuki Motor Corporation and former chairman, Suzuki Motor corp), who died on Dec 25 was born in 1930 as Osamu Matsuda and took up the Suzuki family name after marrying the granddaughter of the patriarch of Suzuki Motor Corp. He had the vision and the risk-appetite to bet on India when none of his bigger rivals believed in the market’s potential. After all, the market size was under 40,000 units (against 41 lakh units now) and one in 14,000 people owned a car (against 35 per 1,000 now).
As govt scouted for partners for state-owned Maruti (set up in 1971 by Sanjay Gandhi to produce affordable car) with a team comprising technocrats R C Bhargava (who at 90 remains Maruti Suzuki‘s non-executive chairman) and V Krishnamurthy – the tie-up with Suzuki was almost a non-starter. Suzuki was itself a small and somewhat struggling Japanese carmaker and had nearly passed off the opportunity to come to India.
Destiny had other plans and a newspaper report, talking about Daihatsu’s interest in the partnering Maruti, got the company moving in quickly after a director informed Suzuki (referred to as ‘OS’ within the company) about the brewing deal.
Suzuki immediately expressed his interest and invited Indian executives to his headquarters at Hamamatsu in Japan, going to the extent of betting his company’s full year earnings on the deal. Although Suzuki got a 26% stake in the joint venture with govt, he outsmarted Daihatsu and others, such as Renault, Fiat SpA, Fuji Heavy Industries and Volkswagen. The joint venture agreement was signed in Oct 1982, and in a record time, the Maruti 800, which went on to define refinement, affordability, fuel efficiency and dependability in the Indian car market, was produced from a near-makeshift facility in Gurgaon in Dec 1983.
Such was the excitement around the venture that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi handed over the keys of the first car to Harpal Singh, an Indian Airlines employee. Suzuki and his Indian bet never looked back. A hands-on professional, he ran and scaled up Maruti at lightning speed with a hawk’s eye on controlling costs, understanding the trends, while inculcating quality manufacturing techniques and famed Japanese processes.
“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,” Bhargava said in a statement, adding that Suzuki taught him “how best to grow a company and make it competitive”.
N K Singh, chairman of the 15th finance commission, who was minister (economic) in the Indian embassy in Japan in the early eighties when the partnership was negotiated, recollects how there were discussions with Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, but Japanese govt indicated that Suzuki may be a better bet, especially because the company had a presence in Pakistan. “Suzuki had great empathy for India and was a big supporter of India arriving on the automobile revolution, which it had missed. He was forward thinking and focused on indigenisation and creating ancillaries with India. He was a harbinger of India’s modern auto industry, a crucial sector,” Singh said. Suzuki and his project with govt – called Maruti Udyog before the Centre divested its stake in the venture – not only led to modernisation of India’s industrialisation engine, but also helped create a robust supplier ecosystem, which also benefited Gurgaon and made it one of the foremost industrial belts in the country (Chennai in Tamil Nadu and Pune in Maharashtra came up later for cars).
Suzuki brought in a culture of equality in the way the company was run – there were open-plan offices (no cabins for the senior teams), uniforms were mandated for executives and assembly-line workers, and a single canteen for everyone’s needs. Even the cars boasted about value for money, and Suzuki himself embodied the theory with many reports that he travelled economy class when in old age. Suzuki’s aggressive posturing and bigger bets on India have seen Maruti, which still has the lion’s share of around 40% in India, grow manifold from its small factory in Gurgaon, then expand further to Manesar, and thereafter to Gujarat, as it works its way to double its production capacity from the current two-million units to a four million by 2030. For his work on industrialising India and modernising the car industry, Suzuki was conferred Padma Bhushan in 2007 by govt.
