Kia is independent. It owns itself.

82 years, two owners since 1980

The year is coloured by whoever held it at the time.

1. 1944 Kia was founded in December 1944 as Kyungsung Precision Industry, a maker of bicycles and bicycle parts such as tyres, pedals and saddles; Kia's own investor information gives 11 December 1944 as the date of establishment.
2. 1997 Kia collapsed in the Asian financial crisis: in July 1997 it was given a court-arranged standstill agreement, and in October 1997, three months later, it was placed under court receivership. This is the failure, not the change of owner, which came a year afterwards.
3. 1999 Hyundai Motor took control of Kia in March 1999. It had been selected in October 1998 as the winning bidder in the third international auction run under Kia's court receivership, after outbidding Ford, but its own business report for 1999 dates the holding from 29 March 1999, when Hyundai Motor subscribed to Kia's capital increase and took 135,557,308 shares, 30.16%, and records Kia as brought into the Hyundai group in April 1999. The widely quoted 51 per cent was the Hyundai side in aggregate rather than any one company's holding; Hyundai Motor's own share never reached half, and its control rested on consolidating Kia as a subsidiary under Korean GAAP, which it did until the K-IFRS transition in 2011.
4. 2011 Hyundai Motor added 204,408 Kia shares in 2011 by exercising bonds with warrants, taking its holding from 33.75 to 33.99 per cent, and in the same year stopped treating Kia as a subsidiary. Its business report for 2010 lists Kia among its consolidated subsidiaries; its report for 2011, the first under Korean IFRS, does not, and it has carried Kia as an associate ever since. So the year Hyundai Motor's holding grew is also the year it stopped being a controlling one: Kia has had no controlling company from 2011, and Hyundai Motor has remained its largest shareholder.