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It was the Swift that changed our perception of Suzuki. Before it first appeared in 2005, Suzuki was known for its small workhorse 4X4s – the LJ, SJ and Santana – and cheap minicars based on Japanese market kei (or small) cars. Swift was a well-priced, modern, European-style supermini with a sporty flavour and was pivotal in Suzuki’s move into the mainstream.
In 2011 Suzuki sold 20,000 cars in the UK. Over the past five years that figure has almost doubled: 38,167 in 2016. This year, with a wider range than ever before and a new generation Swift, launched this month and on sale from June, Suzuki GB expects to exceed 41,000.
Its 160 dealers are happy. Most are owner-drivers with whom Dale Wyatt, Suzuki GB’s sales and marketing director, maintains a direct relationship. There is no dealer council at Suzuki but two or three times a year the company holds a “think tank” in a different part of the country. Suzuki is regularly in the top three in the NFDA Dealer Attitude Survey and comes near the top in surveys of dealer profitability.
The volume growth has been accompanied by a change of emphasis from cheap-and-cheerful to value-for-money. Suzuki’s best-selling model used to be the Alto, famously sold “VAT-free” (20% discount) and the cheapest new car on the UK market. The current entry model is the Celerio which starts at £7,000 but the sales leader is the Vitara, which sits in the middle of the fast-expanding class for small SUV crossovers. Overall, the average transaction price of cars sold in 2016 rose by 11%.
These results fit with Suzuki Motor Corporation’s global plan. It makes 3 million cars a year, is the fourth biggest Japanese car company (thanks mainly to its prominence in the domestic kei car sector), and has a mid-term business plan that includes a new platform strategy with three basic body structures, downsized direct injection petrol engines, and a mild hybrid system. The first results of that are the Baleno hatchback, launched last year, and the Ignis, which has just gone on sale (see panel). Both represent incremental volume; their namesake predecessors, long gone, were rather different kinds of cars.
Learning from past mistakes, Suzuki will not venture beyond the C-sector. The SX4 S-Cross (4.3m) is its biggest model but has not proved as popular as the smaller Vitara; a recent facelift attempts to give it more macho look. The new Swift will complete a six-model range, which forms neatly into three groups – Celerio/Ignis, Swift/Baleno, Vitara/S-Cross – each of which should, according to Wyatt’s targets, sell 15,000 cars a year in the UK.
Suzuki is truly international, building cars in 11 different countries: Celerio comes from Thailand; Baleno from India; Ignis from Japan; and Swift, Vitara and S-Cross from Hungary. It has developed a new series of petrol engines that are used worldwide but does not make its own diesels. A supply of diesel engines was part of the rationale for a cross-shareholding deal with Volkswagen which went disastrously wrong and was expensively unraveled in a London arbitration court in 2015.
Before VW, Suzuki was 20% owned by GM and still feels it needs a partnership with one of major players to embrace new and future technologies such as autonomous driving.
So Osamu Suzuki, its 86-years-old chairman went to see Soichiro Toyoda, the 91-years old honorary chairman of Toyota. The outcome was a co-operation agreement between the two companies. There are no details yet but a Toyota takeover isn’t on the cards. In 2011, I described Suzuki as the world’s biggest little car company. It still is.
