Suzuki and Volkswagen paired up a couple of years ago in an effort to harness each party’s assets as each brand sought to build world-class small cars, but now the Japanese team says that it has entered into an unfair playing field – one that VW seems to want to control.
Suzuki had hoped to take advantage of VW’s powertrain expertise in exchange for helping the German brand gain access to lucrative Asian markets, but the relationship began to sour earlier this year. VW wrote in its annual report that it was planning to influence Suzuki’s decision-making process, a statement that causedSuzuki executive vice president Yasuhito Harayama to proclaim that his automaker would no longer work with VW unless the German brand leveled the playing field.
Neither partner has worked together on a single project in the nearly 19 months since the alliance was announced.
VW acquired nearly a fifth of Suzuki, while Suzuki took a much smaller 2.5 percent chunk of the German brand, a deal that was deemed fair given the size disparity between the two automakers.
“When Suzuki and Volkswagen tied up, we had a basic agreement that we would both be independent and equal partners,” Osamu Suzuki, the automaker’s chairman, wrote in a blog for Japan’s Nikkei newspaper. “Perhaps, because there is a difference in the size of the companies, as time goes by they might have come to think that they wanted to take control.”
Further, Suzuki’s chairman seemed to downplay what VW could offer in the relationship.
“Volkswagen has no technology that Suzuki wants right now,” the chairman said. “If there are technologies that we lack, there are many companies both within and outside Japan with whom we have deep relations so we could seek help from such companies.”