Who Owns Yanmar Tractors?

Magokichi Yamaoka founded Yamaoka Hatsudoki Kosakusho, the Yamaoka Engine Workshop, in Osaka in March 1912, building gas and oil engines for agriculture. The defining achievement came in 1933, when the company produced the world's first practical small horizontal water-cooled diesel engine, the HB model, a breakthrough that made diesel power feasible for farm machinery and fishing boats.

Yanmar moved into powered agricultural equipment after the war, building tillers and small diesel machines for Japan's rice-farming countryside, and began producing tractors in the 1960s. Its compact diesel expertise made it the OEM behind other brands' machines: Yanmar built generations of John Deere compact utility tractors beginning in the late 1970s, a relationship that continued for decades and quietly put Yanmar engineering under green paint across North America.

Under its own badge, the brand developed the YM series and later the YT series of premium compact tractors, including the YT3 line styled with input from industrial designer Ken Okuyama. In 2018 Yanmar launched Auto Tractor and Robot Tractor variants of its YT models with GPS-guided autonomous operation under the SMARTPILOT name.

The group adopted a holding structure in April 2013 and reported consolidated net sales of JPY 1,079.6 billion for the fiscal year ended March 2025, with overseas sales near 60 percent of the total.