Soichiro Honda established Honda Motor Co., Ltd., on September 24, 1948, in Itaya-cho, Hamamatsu, with capital of 1 million yen. In October of the following year, Takeo Fujisawa, who became Soichiro Honda's lifetime partner came aboard as managing director.

The two aimed to build the company into the world's top motorcycle maker. That goal was realized through the sale of the Super Cub C100 in August 1958.

Since the company’s foundation, Honda has always conducted its business with an awareness of the global nature of its operations. Guided by an approach of “building products close to the customer” and striving for the timely offering of products that accommodate the needs of customers all around the world, Honda expanded its automobile production operations to different regions of the world including Asia, Europe, South America and China. In recent years, Honda has been pursuing the establishment of a flexible and mutually complementary production system which utilizes Honda’s 34 automobile production operations in 18 countries and territories. Through these initiatives, Honda reached the 100 million-unit milestone in cumulative automobile production in September 2016, the 54th year since the company started automobile production. Also motorcycle and power products production will add to more than 560 million-unit in cumulative for Honda’s worldwide production.