Today, you can find Yanmar diesel engines inside everything from rented generators and mini excavators to sailboats and tractors. The company’s got quite some history, having built the world’s first compact diesel engine that was inexpensive and dependable enough to sell, back in 1933. Yanmar continues to thrive as a private entity, owned by Yanmar Holdings, a group headquartered out of Osaka, Japan.
Yanmar Holdings doesn’t directly oversee any commercial equipment production. Industrial engines, arguably the company’s most popular product category, are the business of Yanmar Power Technology Co., Ltd. This is a relatively new subsidiary created in 2020 to run the plants that build such engines. However, this subsidiary does not manufacture the boat engines Yanmar is also known for. That job belongs to Yanmar Marine International, which has been based in the Netherlands since 2014. This arm of the group also handles Yanmar’s recreational marine equipment. Yanmar engines also turn up inside machines that have other companies’ branding on the outside. It’s among the companies that build John Deere engines, and it’s also one of several suppliers behind Toro’s lawn mower engines.
Wherever these engines end up, most start off in Japan. Yanmar keeps its most important factories at home, particularly at the Biwa factory in Shiga Prefecture. Over the years, the company has also opened a handful of plants in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
Where are Yanmar engines manufactured?
Yanmar opened its Biwa factory in 1995 on the shore of Lake Biwa. This site manufactures more than 2,000 engine variants and is appropriately called the “mother factory.” Its vertical water-cooled engines power tractors, harvesters, forklifts, and wheeled loaders. The factory features automated lines with the capacity to produce 400,000 units a year. The Biwa plant is joined by another nearby factory in Ibuki, which started up in 2016 and helps out by building the same vertical water-cooled engines.
The bigger engines — the stuff that propels marine diesels, with power output reaching 4,500 kW or about 6,000 horsepower — are manufactured in the Amagasaki plant, established in Hyōgo Prefecture in 1936. Although 6,000 hp is a lot, it’s still modest next to the most powerful diesel engines ever put in ships. However, not all marine engines are built here. Smaller and mid-size units get built at a separate plant in Tsukaguchi instead.
Outside Japan, some of these engines are built by the Yanmar Engine Shandong plant in China. There’s also Yanmar Engine Manufacturing India, which started production near Chennai in January 2022. It’s able to assemble 80,000 engines annually in the 15 to 37 kW class, which works out to roughly 20 to 50 horsepower. Yanmar also builds horizontal water-cooled engines (where the cylinders lie flat) in Thailand and Indonesia. Yanmar Italy, meanwhile, manufactures tiny air-cooled diesel engines, which don’t use coolant and shed heat through fins instead.