Economy
Company that put India behind wheel now faces its biggest test
For about four decades, Suzuki cars have been a fixture on Indian roads.
By relentlessly keeping prices and operating costs low, the Japanese automaker helped millions buy cars, while hatchbacks made by its Indian unit, Maruti Suzuki, accounted for between half and four-fifths of the country’s new car sales in recent decades.
But as Indians got richer, they gravitated to bigger and flashier rides – and the automaker’s emphasis on affordability started to become a drag. Maruti Suzuki’s share of the world’s third-largest auto market now lingers at around 39%, near an all-time low.
Suzuki’s struggles reflect how cost-sensitive managers in Japan were slow to adapt to the changing tastes of newly affluent Indians, four people familiar with its business told Reuters. Executives, the people said, for years felt that demand for sunroofs, advanced technology and SUVs hadn’t trumped questions of affordability for Indians.
It marks the first report that details the deliberations between Indian and Japanese executives at Suzuki as they struggled to pivot beyond a long-successful strategy that emphasized value before almost everything else.
Maruti Suzuki managers first floated the idea of adding sunroofs about a decade ago, the people said. But Japanese bosses considered the feature – which has become a symbol of upward mobility in India – impractical given India’s extreme heat and dusty roads. They worried that adding a more powerful air conditioning unit and strengthening the cabin to accommodate the panel would increase costs and distract from Suzuki’s mission of providing affordable transport.
The carmaker didn’t introduce sunroofs until 2022. By then, fast-growing domestic rivals Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra – which both currently have a market share of around 14% – had sunroofs as standard features on between a quarter and a third of their cars sold in India, according to data from auto research firm JATO Dynamics.
This account of the missteps that eroded Suzuki’s iron grip on India and its subsequent efforts to woo customers back is based on interviews with more than 20 people, including executives, suppliers and others with direct knowledge of the automaker and its Indian business. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to the media.
Maruti’s head of corporate affairs, Rahul Bharti, said in an interview that Japanese managers were not reluctant to embrace the changing tastes of local customers. Instead, he said, they had prioritized factors such as cost and climate, as well as emissions and safety considerations.
Indian and Japanese executives engage in “extensive” talks before introducing products and new features, Bharti said. Maruti’s market share had declined recently because of a collapse in demand for small cars, the automaker’s slow rollout of SUVs and its 2020 decision to stop selling diesel cars, he added.
While it is committed to building affordable and compact models, Suzuki has now directed local managers to “pay more attention to the Indian customer,” Bharti said.
To be sure, Maruti Suzuki still runs a lucrative business in India. Revenue has more than doubled over the last five years to $19 billion and profit tripled to $1.5 billion as margins improved. About 60% of the 3.3 million cars Suzuki sold in the last financial year were in India, and Maruti contributed nearly half of its profits. But while it is making more money from selling fewer cars, the company has fallen short of chief executive Toshihiro Suzuki’s goal of owning half the market.
Maruti Suzuki also risks being seen by younger drivers as a “brand for their parents or grandparents,” said Toshihide Kinoshita, an automotive analyst at Nomura Securities.
In India, the typical buyer of a new car is in their mid-30s. The average age in the United States is 51, according to data from Cox Automotive.
The people’s car
Japanese car manufacturers increasingly see India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, as a lifeline.
Many face an existential threat in traditional strongholds like Southeast Asia from the low costs and fast-paced innovation of Chinese rivals. They are also being squeezed by tariffs in the United States and slow growth at home as Japan’s population shrinks.
Chinese EV makers, however, are largely shut out of India, which has increased scrutiny of investments from China after a deadly border clash between the two countries in 2020. Japanese carmakers sense the opportunity: Toyota and Suzuki have announced plans to spend a cumulative $11 billion to expand manufacturing and other operations in India by 2030.
Maruti Suzuki is now a symbol of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to turn India into a global manufacturing hub.
Suzuki first invested in Maruti in the early 1980s when the Indian brand was state-owned. Then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted to provide a “people’s car” to fulfill the dream of her late son Sanjay, an auto enthusiast who had sought to bring affordable mobility to the middle class.
The Maruti 800 arrived in 1983. It was priced at around $9,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars and became synonymous with India’s modernization. Over three decades, Maruti sold nearly 3 million of the small hatchbacks. Such was the scale of Suzuki’s dominance in India that its former CEO Osamu Suzuki said he aimed to keep a 50% market share “for eternity.”
India’s economy has grown some 18-fold since Suzuki entered the market. Yet Suzuki’s cost-control culture meant managers initially faced resistance when they lobbied to offer advanced driver assistance systems that Mahindra introduced around 2021, some four years before Maruti, three people said.
For many buyers, the modernity and aspiration that Maruti once represented is found in Tata and Mahindra’s feature-laden SUVs, rather than Maruti’s workaday models. Maruti does not have “the bells and whistles” that customers now want, said JATO Dynamics president Ravi Bhatia.
One erstwhile loyalist looking elsewhere is Anil Tiwari, who is seeking a car to supplement his family’s 17-year-old Maruti Alto hatchback. The insurance agent has narrowed his choices down to a Mahindra or a Toyota SUV after his wife and children demanded a sunroof and a large infotainment display, among other technologies.
“My wife and children want the best,” he said.
Fightback?
Maruti has been here before. Its market share dipped below 40% in 2011, though newer models and an expanded sales network helped it recover.
This time, competition is fiercer. Better-equipped rivals and the fall in market share mean Suzuki now faces its toughest situation in India “in the last 40 years,” chief executive Suzuki told reporters at the Tokyo auto show last year.
In an attempt to regain dominance, Suzuki is expanding R&D teams at Maruti and giving executives flexibility to make more decisions locally, five people told Reuters. It aims to cut the average product development time to 36 months from 48 months, four sources added.
Maruti has also built more car-testing labs in India to speed up design and execution, Bharti told Reuters.
Maruti has introduced pricier and more design-forward cars, including a three-row minivan that starts at about $25,000. It plans seven more SUVs by 2030, which will join a recently released model that has a sunroof and advanced driver assistance systems.
The brand is also reversing its decision not to use large display screens in some vehicles, according to three sources, who said Japanese executives had felt they would be a distraction for drivers.
Bharti confirmed that Maruti and Suzuki executives had discussed those concerns. Large displays and similar features are always “on the cards,” he said, though the company continues to weigh customer demand against the realities of Indian driving conditions.
One open question is whether Maruti’s more expensive cars will sell. The brand’s association with affordability means Indians willing to spend more usually don’t consider Maruti, six people told Reuters. Less than 3% of Maruti’s sales come from cars priced above $15,500, compared with over 21% for the rest of the industry, according to JATO Dynamics.
That perception is shaping the choice for buyers like Deepanshu Singhal, a sales executive who plans to upgrade to a Mahindra or Toyota SUV from the Maruti Dzire sedan he has driven for seven years.
“I’d rather spend a little more money for a better car that has some freshness and newness,” he said.
The legal battle over Lisa Cook’s position at the Federal Reserve is entering a new phase as U.S. President Donald Trump moves again to oust the governor despite a Supreme Court setback in June, a letter seen by Reuters showed.
The White House told Cook in a letter this week that the president was “considering” removing her from her role and demanded she respond to unproven mortgage fraud allegations within three weeks – allegations her attorney called “baseless.”
The salvo against Cook is the second time this week Trump has restarted an effort to take actions that the Supreme Court blocked earlier this year. Trump earlier this week also issued another order attempting to limit birthright citizenship after the high court ruled against his previous effort to limit who is automatically considered a U.S. citizen.
The letter to Cook, signed by Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino and first reported by ABC News, alleged that she committed crimes that could be punishable by up to 30 years in prison and that her conduct constituted negligence that called into question her trustworthiness as a Fed governor, ABC reported.
In a statement, Cook’s lawyer said “there is no valid cause” for removing Cook from her position.
“As we did before, we will challenge this latest pretext and preserve her position and the historic role of the Fed,” attorney Abbe D. Lowell said. The Federal Reserve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump last year cited mortgage fraud in trying to fire Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor. Cook denied the allegations, calling them a pretext to remove her for monetary policy differences. The U.S. Supreme Court refused in June to allow the firing, standing firm to preserve the central bank’s cherished independence against the Republican president’s unprecedented challenge.
The court, in a 5-4 ruling, blocked Trump from removing Cook for now, providing a safeguard for the Fed specifically. No other president since the central bank’s founding in 1913 had sought to oust a Fed governor. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the high court ruling, said Trump had “failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her.”
Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices in the ruling. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented. While the ruling definitively protects Fed officials from being fired at will by a president, the court said its ruling was not deciding the validity of the factual dispute in the case.
It has since returned the case to lower courts. “It at least remains an open question what precisely happened here, and indeed whether Cook committed ‘gross negligence,’ let alone ‘deceitful and potentially criminal conduct,’ as the president’s letter alleges,” Roberts wrote, adding that Cook must be able to respond to the charges made against her.
The disruption at Wildberries that has been heavily targeted by Ukraine is sending shockwaves through Russia’s retail sector, affecting tens of thousands of small businesses that rely on the country’s leading e-commerce retailer to sell their products.
In the space of three weeks, Vasily Klimov’s online shopping pick-up point in Moscow has gone from a healthy small business to a loss-making operation he is now desperately trying to sell.
Klimov runs one of 98,000 pick-up points in Russia and neighboring countries where customers collect goods ordered through Wildberries.
But since July 18, when Ukraine began hitting Wildberries warehouses across Russia in a wave of near-nightly drone attacks, his business has taken a massive dive.
Attacks on at least 20 of the company’s sites have sparked major fires, destroyed entire warehouses of stock, and disrupted its vast logistics network across the world’s largest country.
A review of satellite imagery shows at least 1.18 million square metres of warehouse space – more than a fifth of the company’s capacity – has been damaged or destroyed, according to Reuters.
Wildberries, which reported yet another attack on Friday, says it is seeking partners to open new storage hubs.
“Sales have dropped by about 50% over the past month, and that is because there are almost no deliveries,” said Klimov, whose outlet operates under a Wildberries franchise agreement.
“The last month has been entirely loss-making.”
Warehouse attacks bring war’s costs to business
At least 13 people have been killed in the warehouse attacks. Ukraine, which has been defending itself against Russia since February 2022, denies targeting civilians and says the strikes are part of a campaign to “bring the war home” to ordinary Russians and raise the cost to Moscow of continuing the conflict.
Russia this week killed at least 17 people in attacks aimed at commercial warehouses in and around Kyiv that it alleged were being used to store drone components and other “dual-use” goods with military as well as civilian applications.
Ukraine says Wildberries, whose vast product range includes items such as night-vision goggles, ammunition pouches and helmets, alongside regular clothing, cosmetics and electronics, is supporting Russia’s war effort. The company and the Kremlin say it does not supply the army.
The sustained targeting of Wildberries is significant because the company, together with other e-commerce platforms, handles goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s economy.
Central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina said on July 24 that the bank would wait and see whether supply disruptions resulting from the attacks translated into higher inflation.
Elina Ribakova, an economist with the Kyiv School of Economics and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said the attacks could complicate the central bank’s efforts to lower interest rates from their current level of 14%.
“Even though the Russian economy is likely to register zero growth this year, and it was in contraction for the first quarter, inflation is still running high and therefore any small shock could force the central bank either to slow down significantly the cuts or even stop the cuts, so supply side shocks are very important,” she said in a phone interview.
In late July, Russia’s largest lender, Sberbank, said it may increase loan-loss provisions after the drone attacks weakened the credit quality of online retailers and vendors, with about 300 companies seeking to restructure loans.
A source close to the Kremlin told Reuters that many small and medium-sized businesses with “absolutely nothing to do with the war” would suffer.
“There will be a wave of bankruptcies. No one has the kind of money needed to support sellers; we’re talking hundreds of billions of roubles. That’s a significant blow to the economy,” the source said.
The Kremlin said in July that discussions had taken place within the government about possible support for Wildberries. This could include loans from state-owned banks to the company or its sellers, as well as tax breaks or subsidies, sources said at the time.
For sale: Wildberries pick-up point – 1 ruble
According to Wildberries, 95% of orders are collected from pick-up points like Klimov’s. He said deliveries have fallen to around 150 parcels a day from 400 previously. When Reuters visited on Tuesday, no packages arrived.
“I simply do not have enough financial reserves to hold out,” he said, explaining his decision to put the business up for sale despite a lack of buyers. At one point, he jokingly offered to sell it to a Reuters reporter for 1 ruble.
Over 3,100 Wildberries franchised pick-up points were listed for sale across Russia on online marketplace Avito as of Wednesday.
Some businesses are hoping Wildberries will provide additional support. The company says it has increased discounts, granted payment deferrals and made initial voluntary compensation payments to more than 97,000 sellers who lost stock in the attacks.
Fashion brand Finn Flare lost products worth more than 100 million rubles ($1.24 million) in July when drones sparked a blaze at Wildberries’ Elektrostal warehouse east of Moscow, sending huge pillars of black smoke into the air.
“Since available inventory decreased, orders also fell,” the company’s e-commerce director Marina Drozhzhina told Reuters. “We plan to negotiate with Wildberries.”
Others are less optimistic. “I am not counting on compensation because I don’t want to be disappointed later,” said artisan toffee-maker Anna Starostina, who lost 170 boxes of handmade sweets in one of the first drone strikes on a Wildberries warehouse on July 18.
Türkiye is close to breaking into the ranks of the world’s top 10 defense exporters, as domestically developed platforms gain widespread international trust, a top official said Thursday.
Haluk Görgün, head of the Defense Industries Presidency (SSB), said the global success of Turkish defense platforms was driving demand, as he addressed an event marking the second anniversary of the National Competence Initiative in the capital Ankara.
The initiative is a strategic human capital transformation program launched to develop and sustain the technical, behavioral and leadership skills required across Türkiye’s defense and aerospace industry.
The SSB and affiliated companies have been hosting dozens of foreign delegations every week as an increasing number of countries seek to purchase Turkish defense products, Görgün said.
Türkiye’s defense exports hit $5.79 billion in the January-July period, an increase of 26.2% from a year earlier. Annualized sales reached $11.2 billion.
Shipments rose about 48% year-over-year in 2025 to a record of more than $10 billion.
Türkiye is currently the world’s 11th-largest defense exporter, Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz said, addressing the same event Thursday.
“Growth rates are looking very strong this year as well. God willing, we will set a new export record this year,” Yılmaz said.
“Our goal is to place our country among the top 10 exporting nations as soon as possible.”
In recent years, Türkiye has significantly ramped up its defense industry production.
It has injected billions of dollars to transform from a nation heavily reliant on equipment from abroad to one that is a major exporter and where homegrown systems now meet almost all of its defense industry needs.
For much of the past two decades, Ankara has expressed frustration over its Western allies’ failure to provide adequate defense systems against missile threats despite Türkiye being a major NATO member.
The country currently exports more than 230 defense systems to 185 countries.
Stressing technological independence, Görgün said, “Dependence on foreign sources for critical technologies amounts to a silent transfer of sovereignty.”
He noted that the sector’s global success was largely due to its human capital, noting that the average age of defense industry employees in Türkiye was 34, while some companies generating around $1 billion in revenue had an average employee age of under 30.
“Thanks to its young and skilled workforce, Türkiye is ready to meet the needs of its allies for decades to come,” said Görgün.
According to Yılmaz, having a skilled workforce capable of developing, producing and ensuring the sustainability of tomorrow’s technologies is what would help build on the achievements today, maintain technological superiority and prepare for the competitive environment of the future.
He noted that reducing dependence on foreign sources for critical technologies also requires reducing dependence on foreign sources for critical knowledge and skills.
“For this reason, we view the skills gap as a national security issue just as critical as the technology gap,” said Yılmaz, noting that there are approximately 120,000 employees in the defense industry.
Görgün emphasized that nations survive through the capacity they build long before crises emerge and said the National Competence Initiative represented the human resources and competency dimension of the country’s national resilience strategy.
“Many new fields became decisive in ensuring national security, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to quantum technologies, and from space exploration to cybersecurity,” he said.
“We’re determined to be one of the pioneers in this great technological race, since after all, foreign dependence for critical technologies could spell a silent transfer of sovereignty.”
Görgün said the initiative had reached around 500,000 people, bringing together seven target groups, ranging from high school students to industry executives, under a common development model comprising 11 programs.
“We reached 2,541 students over five semesters and included 7,000 vocational and technical high school students from 13 schools in 12 cities in our competency development initiatives, while implementing the Defense Industry Campus Program in eight cities with 3,000 participants,” he said.
“We conducted modules at universities, offering 288 courses to 4,991 students.”
He said career and competency meetings had also been held with a total of 111,000 people, while the Defense Career Platform brought together around 290,000 users and 339 companies.
The platform also delivered around 665 training sessions totaling more than 158,000 hours to over 73,000 users, he added.
Görgün said Erdoğan’s vision of full independence for the Turkish defense industry was “the strongest pillar” supporting the sector through strategic planning.
World food prices rose in July to their highest in more than three years as adverse weather and war escalation in the Gulf and Black Sea supported crop markets, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday.
The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in a basket of internationally traded food commodities, averaged 131.1 points in July, up from 130.3 in June and the highest reading since January 2023.
The world faces another bout of food inflation as wars in Iran and Ukraine, along with El Nino, create a perfect storm of higher costs and lower crop yields, the FAO’s chief economist told Reuters this week.
A 3.4% month-over-month rise in the FAO’s cereal price index drove the July trend, fueled in turn by a 5.8% jump in wheat prices, the agency said.
Wheat markets were affected by concerns over Black Sea export disruptions and heat damage to crops in key producing regions, it said.
The FAO’s vegetable oil index rose 2% to its highest level since June 2022.
Higher crude oil prices amid escalation in the Iran war and strong demand for biodiesel supported palm and soy oil prices, though rapeseed and sunflower oil declined.
Sugar prices rose 5.6% on weather concerns in Europe and Asia and expectations of stronger ethanol demand in Brazil.
In contrast, meat prices fell 2.8% from a record high in June, FAO said.
Poultry, pig and bovine meat prices declined, though sheep meat prices reached a record high amid tight export supplies in Oceania. Dairy prices fell 0.7%.
The FAO’s overall food price index reading for July was slightly above a previous three-year high in April.
The latest reading was nonetheless 18.2% below its March 2022 peak that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Türkiye’s top defense contractor Aselsan said Friday its newly developed Tolun P precision-guided bunker-busting munition successfully struck its target during a live-fire test.
The munition was launched from the Bayraktar Akıncı unmanned combat aerial vehicle to mark another milestone in the country’s domestically developed precision strike capabilities.
In a statement, Aselsan said the 250-pound-class guided munition demonstrated its effectiveness against fortified targets, including armored and reinforced concrete structures.
The company also released footage on social media showing the munition hitting its target with what it described as a direct impact.
Designed for hardened targets
Unlike conventional airdropped bombs, Tolun P is designed to maximize operational efficiency by allowing multiple munitions to be carried on a single platform.
Using Aselsan’s Sadak-4T Multiple Carriage Rack, platforms such as the Akıncı can carry several Tolun P munitions simultaneously. Electronic fuzes can be programmed by pilots from the cockpit shortly before release, enabling multiple strategic targets to be engaged in a single salvo.
Aselsan said Tolun P was specifically developed to strike hardened underground shelters, command centers and reinforced aircraft hangars.
Despite its relatively compact size, the munition combines a specially designed penetrating nose section with high kinetic energy, enabling it to penetrate up to 1 meter of reinforced concrete, according to the company.
The capability is intended to enhance the operational effectiveness and deterrence of Türkiye’s unmanned aerial systems while expanding the Turkish Air Force’s precision strike options.
Expanding Tolun family
Tolun P is one of several variants in Aselsan’s Tolun guided munition family.
Other versions include the Tolun L laser-guided munition, Tolun EW electronic warfare variant, Tolun F guided munition, Tolun IIR equipped with an infrared seeker, and Tolun S, a surface-launched version.
Aselsan said the expanding Tolun family is designed to provide a range of precision engagement options for different operational requirements.
Türkiye has launched a public awareness campaign highlighting the economic cost of terrorism over the past four decades, illustrating how the resources could otherwise have funded major investments in infrastructure, energy, health care and industry.
The campaign comes as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) filed a bill in Parliament to advance the two-year terror-free Türkiye initiative aimed at achieving peace by ending the conflict with the terrorist group PKK and its affiliated structures.
The initiative, launched across digital media platforms under the hashtag “National Solidarity,” said the fight against terrorism had cost Türkiye about $2.3 trillion over the past 40 years and suggests the potential investments that could have been made with those funds.
The campaign has been widely shared on social media, receiving support from Cabinet ministers, lawmakers and other political figures.
Alternative investment scenarios
According to the Directorate of Communications, the estimated cost could have financed renewable energy capacity sufficient to meet Türkiye’s electricity demand for 23 years through solar power or 17 years through wind energy.
The campaign also estimates the same amount could have funded the construction of:
1,888 Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridges (The third Bosporus bridge in Istanbul and one of the longest and widest of its kind in the world) 1,106 Osmangazi Bridges (A 2.6 km suspension bridge crossing the Gulf of Izmit that drastically cuts travel time between Istanbul and Izmir) 195 Northern Marmara Motorways (A major 400+ km express highway bypassing central Istanbul to carry intercity freight and transit) 218 Istanbul Airports (Türkiye’s massive main international aviation hub located on the European side of Istanbul) 1,504 Eurasia Tunnels (A 5.4 km double-deck undersea road tunnel connecting Istanbul’s European and Asian sides under the Bosporus)
Industry, healthcare, housing
The campaign also presents estimates of what the funds could have supported across other sectors.
According to the published infographics, the resources would have been sufficient to build:
15,000 organized industrial zones 2,000 automobile manufacturing plants 4,500 high-technology production facilities 7,500 defense industry manufacturing facilities
Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır said eliminating terrorism would create stronger conditions for investment, production and economic development.
“With a Terror-Free Türkiye, the path for investment, production and development will become much stronger,” Kacır said.
“Türkiye will write new economic success stories with the spirit of National Solidarity.”
The campaign also estimates the funds could have financed:
5,150 city hospitals More than 3.65 million family health centers Around 36.3 million social housing units More than 31.1 million earthquake-resistant homes 460,000 schools, each with 24 classrooms, totaling around 11 million classrooms 1,150 dams 66,500 firefighting helicopters or 32,000 firefighting aircraft
Security, economic development
In a statement accompanying the campaign, the Directorate of Communications said terrorism had targeted not only Türkiye’s security but also its economic development and social welfare.
“For years, the trillions of dollars allocated to combating terrorism prevented investments in our future, from energy and education to healthcare, transportation, industry and technology,” the statement said.
The statement also cited President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s remarks that achieving the goal of a Terror-Free Türkiye would benefit all 86 million citizens by supporting economic growth, development and national prosperity.
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