In the chaos of 1947, a Muslim saddle-maker named Kareem Deen was preparing to leave for Pakistan. He had built a brand name for his own small business, and before he left, he did something that had nothing to do with profit.
When Om Prakash asked if the Munjals could use his trade name for their own business, Kareem Deen immediately agreed.
That name was Hero.
Decades later, it would sit on the fuel tank of one of the best-selling motorcycles globally. But at the time, it was just a word, handed from one trader to another with nothing more than a nod, in the kind of transaction that ran entirely on reputation and goodwill, because nobody around them had any real notion of what a brand was worth. As of August 23, 2026, Hero MotoCorp is valued at Rs 1.14 lakh crore.
From ordnance factory worker to bicycle trader
Brijmohan Lall Munjal was born on 1 July 1923 in Kamalia, then part of Punjab’s Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan’s Toba Tek Singh district, to Bahadur Chand Munjal and Thakuri Devi. His parents had seven sons and a daughter. Brijmohan was the sixth-born. One brother, Sohan Lal, died in an accident at the age of seven. The rest, Bal Mukund, Sadanand, Dayanand, Satyanand and Om Prakash, would all, at different points and in different cities, become part of the business that eventually became Hero.
He never received a formal business education. As a teenager, he ran away to a gurukul and stayed there two years before his mother had him brought home. Later, by watching his parents run their own modest business, he started his own.
Before bicycles, he worked as a daily-wage hand at an Indian Ordnance Factory in Quetta.
Before Hero, there were bicycle parts
His brother Dayanand started a bicycle-parts trade in Amritsar in January 1944; Om Prakash joined him that November, and together they opened a small shop for parts and repairs. There was no factory yet, no brand, no dealer network. Just the brothers travelling with samples, trying to convince sceptical shopkeepers to place an order.
Dealers, understandably wary of an unknown young trader, told him plainly that he might show one product and deliver another. Munjal’s answer was to ask for a single order. If the goods did not match his word, he told them, they would never have to buy from him again. That promise kept the flow of orders. In fact, it is what he later credited helped build Hero’s early reputation for reliability, as per Forbes India.
The travel was relentless and almost entirely by train. Munjal recalled being in Bengaluru one day, Tuticorin the next morning, then shuttling between Nagpur and Bombay, at a time when India had neither the roads nor the domestic flights to make that kind of movement easy, according to Forbes India.
The gamble that took Munjal into manufacturing
A 1946 flood in Amritsar pushed the family out, first briefly to Agra, then to Ludhiana, where the brothers set up a small bicycle parts shop and, soon after, a shed to manufacture components and assemble bicycles. They ran it for a decade, all the way up to the actual birth of Hero Cycles in 1956.
That year, Hero Cycles was registered with a seed capital of Rs 9,50,000. Its first year of production was merely 639 bicycles. The number climbed to 7,803 the following year and to roughly 31,000 a year by 1961.
Getting the licence to manufacture was a struggle on its own. In 1956, 128 small-scale units across India were granted licences to make bicycles, under a government quota capped at 2.5 lakh units. The Munjals didn’t want a small-scale licence.
Munjal later explained the logic – Though a small licence would help them make money quickly, yet something told him that getting into large-scale manufacturing could change his family’s fortunes for good. That meant convincing the Union Minister for Industry then to amend the 1956 Industrial Policy to permit large-scale bicycle manufacturing, a push backed by Punjab’s then Chief Minister, Partap Singh Kairon, who saw in the Munjals the kind of hungry, displaced entrepreneurs he wanted driving his state’s industrialisation.
Established players like Raleigh, Hercules and Atlas did not take the new entrant seriously at first, leaning on their British technology and deeper pockets. Munjal later reminisced that they were caught off guard by how fast Hero found its feet.
By the late 1970s, Hero Cycles was India’s largest bicycle manufacturer. In 1986, a Tokyo trade paper and then the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed it: Hero was the largest bicycle maker on earth, a title the company has held on to ever since.
The Honda alliance and the ‘Fill It, Shut It, Forget It’ era
By the early 1980s, Munjal was looking for what came after bicycles, and his instinct pointed towards scooters, which still dominated India’s two-wheeler market.
This was also the time well-known Japanese brand Honda had already tied up with the Firodia family for scooters and been scouting for a partner for their motorcycle business in India. They wanted the Munjals for motorcycles. Munjal was hesitant initially. Eventually, these motorcycles were what made Hero a household name.
Combining Japanese technology with the company’s local manufacturing. The joint-venture agreement was signed on 24 December 1983, after ten days of the Munjals and Honda negotiators going through it line by line in Tokyo.
Hero Honda Motors was officially incorporated on 19 January 1984, with a plant coming up at Dharuhera in Haryana. Munjal had pushed hard in those Tokyo talks on one particular number: he wanted the motorcycle to deliver 100 kilometres to the litre. Honda’s engineers said it was impossible; 65 was the ceiling. They settled at 80 kmpl finally.
Part of what drew Honda to the Munjals was how closely their way of running a business resembled Honda’s own – tight control over finances and materials, low staff turnover, and an early instinct for what would later be called ‘just-in-time manufacturing’. One Honda-side negotiator who had worked with other Indian companies said he had never seen the Japanese show as much respect for an Indian partner as they showed Munjal.
Hero Honda’s first motorcycle, the CD 100, hit the roads riding on an unforgettable 1984 ad line: “Fill it, Shut it, Forget it.” It was the only four-stroke motorcycle in the 100cc category at a time when every other Japanese partnership in India was running on two-stroke engines, which made it markedly less polluting and, over time, cheaper to run even though it cost a little more upfront.
It was built for a market where consumers had grown used to waiting years for a scooter. The CD 100 sold on fuel efficiency and reliability rather than glamour, and it began to tilt India’s two-wheeler market away from scooters for good, selling 40,000 units in its very first year.
The dealer network that became Hero’s moat
What set Hero apart in the years that followed was not just the machine but how Munjal ran the relationships around it. He personally built the dealer network at a time when Indian auto retail had no real structure to speak of. He was known to remember dealers by their first names. He took them on trips abroad, an idea almost nobody else in the Indian manufacturing circle was doing at the time.
In June 1991, his elder son Raman Kant Munjal, who had been deeply involved in building Hero Honda, died suddenly. Munjal, who had begun easing into the background, stepped back into an active leadership role alongside his younger son, Pawan.
The numbers that turned Hero Honda into a global two-wheeler giant
The turn of the century brought the numbers that made Hero Honda a household name beyond India. Between March 2000 and March 2011, revenue climbed from Rs 2,118 crore to Rs 20,787 crore, and profit from Rs 192 crore to Rs 1,927 crore. In 2001, Hero Honda became the world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer by volume. By 2002, the company had sold roughly 8.6 million motorcycles, with daily production touching 16,000 units, as per Forbes India.
The momentum has only accelerated in recent years. Revenue grew from Rs 37,456 crore in FY2024 to Rs 40,756 crore in FY2025, before surging to Rs 46,830 crore in FY2026, while net profit rose from Rs 3,968 crore to Rs 4,610 crore, and then to Rs 5,268 crore over the same period. Margins strengthened in step, with net profit margin climbing from 10.59% to 11.25%, even as the company continued to post record numbers quarter after quarter.
In Q1FY27, Hero MotoCorp reported a 29% year-on-year rise in standalone net profit to Rs 1,454 crore, compared with Rs 1,126 crore in the year-ago quarter. Revenue from operations rose 36% year-on-year to Rs 12,999 crore from Rs 9,579 crore, while motorcycle and scooter volumes increased 23% to 16.77 lakh units from 13.67 lakh units in Q1FY26.
Unwinding the Joint Venture: Building Hero MotoCorp
The going wasn’t always smooth. Pretty much like the roads the bikes travelled, there were bumps ahead. On 21 December 2010, Hero and Honda began unwinding their joint venture. This brought an end to a partnership that had turned a bicycle company into the world’s biggest two-wheeler maker. Munjal was 87 and still sitting in on top-management meetings as the tension built. The core problem, as he later explained it, was that Honda’s own independent motorcycle ambitions in India meant it had started becoming both technology partner and competitor at once, an arrangement no company could sustain indefinitely.
Hero bought out Honda’s stake, and in 2011 Hero Honda was renamed Hero MotoCorp, continuing to pay royalties for the Hero Honda name through a transition period into 2013. Munjal described the split without bitterness, framing it as business rather than any personal falling-out.
What followed tested their grit and determination all over again. Can Hero survive on its own? In August 2013, barely two years after the break-up, Hero MotoCorp produced its 50 millionth two-wheeler, becoming the first Indian two-wheeler company to hit that mark. That same year, at 90, Munjal was still putting in six-hour days at the office, as per Forbes India. Asked about retirement, he said that as long as he was capable of working, he saw no reason to stop, Forbes India reported.
The honours followed the milestones. A Padma Bhushan in 2005. Honorary doctorates from Banaras Hindu University and IIT Kharagpur. A Forbes India Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 for building the world’s largest bicycle maker and then the world’s largest two-wheeler maker, twice over, with a broken partnership in between.
The brothers behind the Hero story
His younger son, Pawan, had taken over the reins of the company as managing director and CEO of Hero Honda in 2001 and eventually took over as chairman when Munjal stepped down to become chairman emeritus in June 2015. Within the family, Munjal was known simply as Papaji, a man reportedly involved in the lives of all his thirty grandchildren.
His brother Om Prakash, the co-founder who had first asked Kareem Deen for the Hero name, had by then built his own reputation as a businessman, poet and philanthropist who preferred a bicycle to a fast car and did not think of rival manufacturers as enemies. The bond between the two brothers was manifested in their death too. Om Prakash passed away in August, at 87, at the DMC Hero Heart Centre in Ludhiana. Brijmohan soon followed his elder brother in their eternal journey on 1 November, at 92. Thousands turned up for his memorial at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Stadium.
At the time of his passing, Brijmohan Lall Munjal’s personal net worth was estimated as $3 billion, as per Forbes. As of his family, Pawan Munjal and Family’s net worth is estimated at $5.65 billion as per Forbes 2025 data.
A legacy beyond motorcycles
Munjal’s interests outside the factory floor stayed famously modest: yoga and movies, as per Forbes India. He believed there was no better investment than education, because it paid back the individual and society at once.
That belief eventually acquired his name. A man who never sat through a formal business degree has a university named after him: BML Munjal University. It is, in some ways, the most fitting monument to a career that began with a borrowed brand name, a handful of samples, and a promise kept to sceptical dealers one order at a time.
Editorial Note: This is an independent profile. Representatives of Hero Motocorp were contacted but did not respond prior to the time of publication. In the absence of direct comment, this article was reported using publicly available records, the book titled “The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India”, and regulatory filings, where applicable. This content was produced in accordance with FinancialExpress.com’s editorial guidelines.