Within the chaos of 1947, a Muslim saddle-maker named Kareem Deen was getting ready to go away for Pakistan. He had constructed a model identify for his personal small enterprise, and earlier than he left, he did one thing that had nothing to do with revenue.
When Om Prakash requested if the Munjals might use his commerce identify for their very own enterprise, Kareem Deen instantly agreed.
That identify was Hero.
Many years later, it might sit on the gas tank of one of many best-selling bikes globally. However on the time, it was only a phrase, handed from one dealer to a different with nothing greater than a nod, within the sort of transaction that ran solely on repute and goodwill, as a result of no person round them had any actual notion of what a model was price. As of August 23, 2026, Hero MotoCorp is valued at Rs 1.14 lakh crore.
From ordnance manufacturing unit employee to bicycle dealer
Brijmohan Lall Munjal was born on 1 July 1923 in Kamalia, then a part of Punjab’s Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan’s Toba Tek Singh district, to Bahadur Chand Munjal and Thakuri Devi. His mother and father had seven sons and a daughter. Brijmohan was the sixth-born. One brother, Sohan Lal, died in an accident on the age of seven. The remaining, Bal Mukund, Sadanand, Dayanand, Satyanand and Om Prakash, would all, at totally different factors and in numerous cities, turn out to be a part of the enterprise that finally grew to become Hero.
He by no means acquired a proper enterprise training. As a teen, he ran away to a gurukul and stayed there two years earlier than his mom had him introduced dwelling. Later, by watching his mother and father run their very own modest enterprise, he began his personal.
Earlier than bicycles, he labored as a daily-wage hand at an Indian Ordnance Manufacturing facility in Quetta.
Earlier than Hero, there have been bicycle elements
His brother Dayanand began a bicycle-parts commerce in Amritsar in January 1944; Om Prakash joined him that November, and collectively they opened a small store for elements and repairs. There was no manufacturing unit but, no model, no vendor community. Simply the brothers travelling with samples, attempting to persuade sceptical shopkeepers to position an order.
Sellers, understandably cautious of an unknown younger dealer, instructed him plainly that he may present one product and ship one other. Munjal’s reply was to ask for a single order. If the products didn’t match his phrase, he instructed them, they’d by no means have to purchase from him once more. That promise stored the circulation of orders. In actual fact, it’s what he later credited helped construct Hero’s early repute for reliability, as per Forbes India.
The journey was relentless and nearly solely by practice. Munjal recalled being in Bengaluru at some point, Tuticorin the subsequent morning, then shuttling between Nagpur and Bombay, at a time when India had neither the roads nor the home flights to make that sort of motion simple, based on Forbes India.
The gamble that took Munjal into manufacturing
A 1946 flood in Amritsar pushed the household out, first briefly to Agra, then to Ludhiana, the place the brothers arrange a small bicycle elements store and, quickly after, a shed to fabricate parts and assemble bicycles. They ran it for a decade, all the way in which as much as the precise delivery of Hero Cycles in 1956.
That yr, Hero Cycles was registered with a seed capital of Rs 9,50,000. Its first yr of manufacturing was merely 639 bicycles. The quantity climbed to 7,803 the next yr and to roughly 31,000 a yr by 1961.
Getting the licence to fabricate was a wrestle by itself. In 1956, 128 small-scale items throughout India have been granted licences to make bicycles, underneath a authorities quota capped at 2.5 lakh items. The Munjals didn’t desire a small-scale licence.
Munjal later defined the logic – Although a small licence would assist them earn a living rapidly, but one thing instructed him that entering into large-scale manufacturing might change his household’s fortunes for good. That meant convincing the Union Minister for Trade then to amend the 1956 Industrial Coverage to allow large-scale bicycle manufacturing, a push backed by Punjab’s then Chief Minister, Partap Singh Kairon, who noticed within the Munjals the sort of hungry, displaced entrepreneurs he wished driving his state’s industrialisation.
Established gamers like Raleigh, Hercules and Atlas didn’t take the brand new entrant significantly at first, leaning on their British expertise and deeper pockets. Munjal later reminisced that they have been caught off guard by how briskly Hero discovered its toes.
By the late Seventies, Hero Cycles was India’s largest bicycle producer. In 1986, a Tokyo commerce paper after which the Guinness E book of World Data confirmed it: Hero was the most important bicycle maker on earth, a title the corporate has held on to ever since.
The Honda alliance and the ‘Fill It, Shut It, Overlook It’ period
By the early Eighties, Munjal was in search of what got here after bicycles, and his intuition pointed in direction of scooters, which nonetheless dominated India’s two-wheeler market.
This was additionally the time well-known Japanese model Honda had already tied up with the Firodia household for scooters and been scouting for a companion for his or her motorbike enterprise in India. They wished the Munjals for bikes. Munjal was hesitant initially. Finally, these bikes have been what made Hero a family identify.
Combining Japanese expertise with the corporate’s native manufacturing. The joint-venture settlement was signed on 24 December 1983, after ten days of the Munjals and Honda negotiators going by way of it line by line in Tokyo.
Hero Honda Motors was formally included on 19 January 1984, with a plant developing at Dharuhera in Haryana. Munjal had pushed onerous in these Tokyo talks on one specific quantity: he wished the motorbike to ship 100 kilometres to the litre. Honda’s engineers stated it was not possible; 65 was the ceiling. They settled at 80 kmpl lastly.
A part of what drew Honda to the Munjals was how carefully their means of operating a enterprise resembled Honda’s personal – tight management over funds and supplies, low workers turnover, and an early intuition for what would later be referred to as ‘just-in-time manufacturing’. One Honda-side negotiator who had labored with different Indian firms stated he had by no means seen the Japanese present as a lot respect for an Indian companion as they confirmed Munjal.
Hero Honda’s first motorbike, the CD 100, hit the roads driving on an unforgettable 1984 advert line: “Fill it, Shut it, Overlook it.” It was the one four-stroke motorbike within the 100cc class at a time when each different Japanese partnership in India was operating on two-stroke engines, which made it markedly much less polluting and, over time, cheaper to run although it value somewhat extra upfront.
It was constructed for a market the place customers had grown used to ready years for a scooter. The CD 100 bought on gas effectivity and reliability quite than glamour, and it started to tilt India’s two-wheeler market away from scooters for good, promoting 40,000 items in its very first yr.
The vendor community that grew to become Hero’s moat
What set Hero aside within the years that adopted was not simply the machine however how Munjal ran the relationships round it. He personally constructed the vendor community at a time when Indian auto retail had no actual construction to talk of. He was identified to recollect sellers by their first names. He took them on journeys overseas, an concept nearly no person else within the Indian manufacturing circle was doing on the time.
In June 1991, his elder son Raman Kant Munjal, who had been deeply concerned in constructing Hero Honda, died instantly. Munjal, who had begun easing into the background, stepped again into an lively management function alongside his youthful son, Pawan.
The numbers that turned Hero Honda into a world two-wheeler large
The flip of the century introduced the numbers that made Hero Honda a family identify past India. Between March 2000 and March 2011, income climbed from Rs 2,118 crore to Rs 20,787 crore, and revenue from Rs 192 crore to Rs 1,927 crore. In 2001, Hero Honda grew to become the world’s largest two-wheeler producer by quantity. By 2002, the corporate had bought roughly 8.6 million bikes, with day by day manufacturing touching 16,000 items, as per Forbes India.
The momentum has solely accelerated in recent times. Income grew from Rs 37,456 crore in FY2024 to Rs 40,756 crore in FY2025, earlier than surging to Rs 46,830 crore in FY2026, whereas internet revenue rose from Rs 3,968 crore to Rs 4,610 crore, after which to Rs 5,268 crore over the identical interval. Margins strengthened in step, with internet revenue margin climbing from 10.59% to 11.25%, whilst the corporate continued to publish file numbers quarter after quarter.
In Q1FY27, Hero MotoCorp reported a 29% year-on-year rise in standalone internet revenue to Rs 1,454 crore, in contrast with Rs 1,126 crore within the year-ago quarter. Income from operations rose 36% year-on-year to Rs 12,999 crore from Rs 9,579 crore, whereas motorbike and scooter volumes elevated 23% to 16.77 lakh items from 13.67 lakh items in Q1FY26.
Unwinding the Joint Enterprise: Constructing Hero MotoCorp
The going wasn’t all the time easy. Just about just like the roads the bikes travelled, there have been bumps forward. On 21 December 2010, Hero and Honda started unwinding their three way partnership. This introduced an finish to a partnership that had turned a bicycle firm into the world’s greatest two-wheeler maker. Munjal was 87 and nonetheless sitting in on top-management conferences as the stress constructed. The core downside, as he later defined it, was that Honda’s personal unbiased motorbike ambitions in India meant it had began changing into each expertise companion and competitor directly, an association no firm might maintain indefinitely.
Hero purchased out Honda’s stake, and in 2011 Hero Honda was renamed Hero MotoCorp, persevering with to pay royalties for the Hero Honda identify by way of a transition interval into 2013. Munjal described the break up with out bitterness, framing it as enterprise quite than any private falling-out.
What adopted examined their grit and willpower another time. Can Hero survive by itself? In August 2013, barely two years after the break-up, Hero MotoCorp produced its 50 millionth two-wheeler, changing into the primary Indian two-wheeler firm to hit that mark. That very same yr, at 90, Munjal was nonetheless placing in six-hour days on the workplace, as per Forbes India. Requested about retirement, he stated that so long as he was able to working, he noticed no purpose to cease, Forbes India reported.
The honours adopted the milestones. A Padma Bhushan in 2005. Honorary doctorates from Banaras Hindu College and IIT Kharagpur. A Forbes India Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 for constructing the world’s largest bicycle maker after which the world’s largest two-wheeler maker, twice over, with a damaged partnership in between.
The brothers behind the Hero story
His youthful son, Pawan, had taken over the reins of the corporate as managing director and CEO of Hero Honda in 2001 and finally took over as chairman when Munjal stepped all the way down to turn out to be chairman emeritus in June 2015. Inside the household, Munjal was identified merely as Papaji, a person reportedly concerned within the lives of all his thirty grandchildren.
His brother Om Prakash, the co-founder who had first requested Kareem Deen for the Hero identify, had by then constructed his personal repute as a businessman, poet and philanthropist who most popular a bicycle to a quick automobile and didn’t consider rival producers as enemies. The bond between the 2 brothers was manifested of their loss of life too. Om Prakash handed away in August, at 87, on the DMC Hero Coronary heart Centre in Ludhiana. Brijmohan quickly adopted his elder brother of their everlasting journey on 1 November, at 92. Hundreds turned up for his memorial at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Stadium.
On the time of his passing, Brijmohan Lall Munjal’s private internet price was estimated as $3 billion, as per Forbes. As of his household, Pawan Munjal and Household’s internet price is estimated at $5.65 billion as per Forbes 2025 knowledge.
A legacy past bikes
Munjal’s pursuits exterior the manufacturing unit flooring stayed famously modest: yoga and flicks, as per Forbes India. He believed there was no higher funding than training, as a result of it paid again the person and society directly.
That perception finally acquired his identify. A person who by no means sat by way of a proper enterprise diploma has a college named after him: BML Munjal College. It’s, in some methods, essentially the most becoming monument to a profession that started with a borrowed model identify, a handful of samples, and a promise stored to sceptical sellers one order at a time.
Editorial Observe: That is an unbiased profile. Representatives of Hero Motocorp have been contacted however didn’t reply previous to the time of publication. Within the absence of direct remark, this text was reported utilizing publicly out there data, the guide titled “The Making of Hero: 4 Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Formed India”, and regulatory filings, the place relevant. This content material was produced in accordance with FinancialExpress.com’s editorial tips.
