Honda Aiming for 50 Per Cent Motorcycle Market Share by 2030
Honda is predicting that by 2030 60 million bikes will be on the world's roads and it wants 30 million of them to be Honda-built
Honda has big plans for its motorcycle business as we head towards the end of the second decade of the 2000s. In fact, it wants half of all bikes on the road globally to wear a ‘Honda’ badge.
A few weeks ago, Honda held a press conference to both advise where it sits currently in the global motorcycle market, and where it wants to be in the future. While Honda’s might in the two-wheeled (and four-wheeled) world cannot be ignored, it’s not resting on its laurels, and is pushing harder than ever to remain in the top spot.
Honda’s lofty ambition is to own 50 per cent of the global motorcycle market by 2030, meaning in just five years, it wants to have 30 million Honda-built bikes on the roads. An incredible target that may be, but with 500,000,000 (yes you read that right!) Honda motorcycles set to trundle off the production line in 2025, if anyone can do it, it’s Honda. And it’s not like Honda has far to go to achieve its target (figuratively speaking) as by the end of the 2025 fiscal year (March 2025) it expects to have 2.2 million sold globally, already a 40 per cent share of the market of the estimated 50 million bikes sold globally by all marques.
Granted, a vast majority of those bikes are going to be from the high-volume end of the range, meaning its cheap and cheerful commuters and scooters that will be doing the majority of the heavy lifting. It’s also expected that the Asian markets will be key to Honda’s planned global dominance, as they have been for many years.
It’s thought that around 85 per cent of Honda’s global sales come from India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, with the Japanese, European, and American markets only adding around six per cent to the pot - around 1.2 million bikes. So with all of America’s, Europe’s, and Japan’s big-money economies, the sales of bike in those three regions drown in comparison to those going to the central and east Asian nations. This highlights how Honda sees small capacity, high volume, low margin bikes as one of the keys to global domination.
“Dripping water can penetrate the stone”
Honda might not have it all its own way, though, and as the old Chinese proverb above highlights, persistence and patience can overcome almost any obstacle. The Chinese motorcycle industry was once something of a laughing stock on the global stage. The majority of the bikes it produced were rip-offs of European or Japanese models, and when you peeled back the layers further, they were little more than dressed up clones of bikes the rest of the motorcycle world had been making for twenty or thirty years.
That isn’t the case now. And as brands like CFMoto, QJMotor, and Zontes have shown in recent years they are now starting to produce bikes with tech, spec and features that are rivals for the establishment. What the homegrown Chinese brands don’t yet have is the prestige that comes from buying from one of the world’s most famous motorcycle brands. That will likely take a little longer to replicate.
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
