Born Osamu Matsuda in Gero, a spa town in south-central Japan, the future automaker studied law and began his professional life in a local bank. He only adopted the name Suzuki in the late 1950s upon marriage to his wife, Shoko, the granddaughter of the patriarch of the Suzuki Motor Corporation, Michio Suzuki.
Described in his Reuters’ obituary as “an ingenious penny pincher,” Osamu Suzuki worked his way up through the company, becoming chairman and CEO in 1978. Under his leadership, Suzuki accelerated its overseas expansion program, most notably entering India in 1982 in a process that has made Maruti-Suzuki the country’s leading automaker, an achievement understandably featuring in every obituary about the former industrialist.
Far less acknowledged was his company’s pioneering investment in Hungary, establishing the Magyar Suzuki car plant at Esztergom, 50 kilometers north of Budapest, in 1990-2.
This project brought Suzuki into contact with Péter Ákos Bod, at the time Minister of Economy and Trade in the cabinet of Prime Minister József Antall.
Bod well remembers their first encounter, and the strong impression made by the ambitious CEO.
“I first met Osamu Suzuki in the autumn of 1990, when he visited Hungary planning to build a plant. As a young minister, I was upbeat about the plan and tried to direct him to choose Miskolc or Ózd, both industrial cities in distressed areas with high and growing unemployment rates,” he recalled to the Budapest Business Journal. But the man from Gero had other ideas.
“He cut me short, in a very direct way, atypical as I thought in oriental business culture, claiming that the Hungarian industrial workers had been ‘spoilt’ in communist times,” Bod continued.
“Who would then build your car?” Bod asked, somewhat angrily as he remembers.
“Housewives and farmers,” Suzuki replied.
“Yes, the plant is now in Esztergom, a quiet rural town on the Danube,” Bod muses. It seemed an incongruous choice then, with the location more famed for its cathedral and ecclesiastical connections than any manufacturing prowess.
Regardless, the investment was a headline-grabbing project internationally and a significant fillip to Hungary’s brand and economy. A year or so later, Bod became Governor of the MNB, though he maintained his relationship with Suzuki.
“I later visited the Hamamatsu plant in Japan and met him several times at the national bank to discuss how to manage exchange rate volatility. He was always outspoken but friendly. He even contacted me with a job offer, but I had no intention to become CEO for Magyar Suzuki and give up the bank governorship, although I appreciated his suggestion,” he recalls.
Perhaps most pertinently, Bod added that Osamu Suzuki, unlike many from the Orient, “certainly said what he thought.”
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of March 21, 2025.
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