The Honda Motor Company, with its famous slogan 'The Power of Dreams' is a Japanese public multinational corporation, most commonly known as an automobile manufacturer, producing cars and motorcycles, but is also a major player in the production of power equipment, engines, robots, aircraft, solar cells, mountain bikes and all-terrain vehicles.
Honda is the world's largest motorcycles manufacturer, and has been since 1959, and became the second largest Japanese automobile manufacturer just after the turn of the century, in 2001.
The company is well known for its green credentials, and has a number of electric and alternatively fuelled vehicles on the market, such as the Honda Civic GX, which runs on natural gas, the Honda Insight, which uses electricity to run, and the Honda FCX Clarity, which is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The company was founded in Hamamatsu, Japan on 24th September 1948 by Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa. Since a very young age, Soichiro Honda had had a passion for automobiles, and he even worked in a garage as a youngster, tuning cars and entering them into races. Honda passed away on 5th August 1991, but the company has gone from strength to strength in his memory, managing to turnover £62 billion in the year of 2012.
Hyandai Group was a South Korean multinational conglomerate first founded as a construction company in 1947 by Chung Ju-yung. It started out entering the markets of Thailand, Guam and Vietnam and didn't start producing cars until Hyundai Motor Company was formed 20 years later in 1967. The company Hyuandai Heavy Industries was founded in 1973, made to produce ships which it first did so in 1974.
Until the 1997 East Asian economic crash where Hyundai was forced to undergo a major restructuring and break-up process, the company was responsible for producing products in the following industries: Automobiles, Heavy Industry, Finance and Insurance, Construction, Engineering, Retail, Aerospace, Defence and Steel.
Nowadays, most companies which bear the Hyundai branding aren't connected legally to the Hyundai Group itself. Now, companies such as Hyundai Motor Group, Hyundai Department Store Group, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Hyundai Development Company are individually run by relatives of company founder Chung.