Volkswagen And Suzuki, Working Together Or Apart?

Reference to Schumpeter’s Blog from The Economist

VW’s struggles on the road to world domination

In 2009, Volkswagen announced the “comprehensive partnership” with Suzuki hoping to expand its market worldwide. In this partnership, Suzuki agreed to teach Volkswagen about hybrid and diesel engine and in return, Volkswagen would offer its knowledge on how to make profit from small cheap car. However, the partnership soon faced its challenge when the director of Suzuki stated that “Volkswagen viewed Suzuki as a subsidiary company instead of partner” in his blog. With distrust and unequal respect, both Volkswagen and Suzuki sensed the difficulty working with each other.

I think the story is related to both entrepreneurship and cooperative working. Both firms seeks the great profit in the long term from developing a partnership innovatively with each other. However, in the reference blog post, it mentioned that Suzuki and Volkswagen have different expectation and goals for this relationship. The questions are: what attitude should these two firms take when realizing they’re not on the same page? what action can either of the firms take if they feel being mistreated? Answer: doesn’t matter if it’s large corporations like Volkswagen or Suzuki or just ordinary small business, it is difficult to make solutions to the problems if none of the players agree to talk and act publicly.