The former manager of Suzuki Motor, Osamu Suzuki, who turned the company into a global player, dies at the age of 94.

TOKYO (AP) – Osamu Suzuki, former head of Suzuki Motor Corp. who helped transform the Japanese small car maker into a globally competitive company, has died, the company said Friday. He was 94 years old.

Suzuki was known for his frankness and friendliness, calling himself “an old man from a small to medium-sized company.” He became the CEO of Suzuki in 1978 and led the company when it became the first Japanese company to start manufacturing in India, where its cars proved to be very popular.

He was born on Jan. 30, 1930 as Osamu Matsuda, Suzuki worked in a bank after graduating from Tokyo’s Chuo University School of Law. He joined Suzuki Motor, based in the center of the Japanese city of Hamamatsu, in 1958 when he married the daughter of the former president of the company at that time, Shunzo Suzuki, who belongs to the family that founded the company. As is sometimes the custom in such cases, Matsuda took his wife’s last name.

In 1979, after a year as the fourth president of the Suzuki Motor company, he introduced an inexpensive small car, which became very popular and promoted in the world market.

Under Suzuki’s leadership, the company’s sales grew more than tenfold to 3 trillion yen ($19 billion) in the 2000s. .

Suzuki also led business partnerships with other world leaders such as General Motors and Volkswagen AG in the 2000s. In the midst of increasing competition and industrial revolution, Suzuki also formed a financial alliance with Toyota Motor Corp. in 2019 to jointly develop self-driving cars.

While other Japanese automakers are expanding into the US and China markets, offering a wide variety of vehicles, Suzuki still sticks to smaller and smaller cars, especially in South and Southeast Asia.

Suzuki emphasized the importance of understanding the ground levels.

“Making high-quality and low-cost products is the basis of production,” Suzuki once told an interview with broadcaster NHK. “We cannot reduce costs while sitting in the offices of the president or the chairman, so I must be in the factory to understand the work and get ideas.”

Suzuki stepped down as president at the age of 85 in 2015, handing over the position to his son, Toshihiro Suzuki. He served as an advisor to the company after stepping down as chairman in 2021.

The company said Suzuki died on Wednesday due to malignant lymphoma.