Ohioans can be very proud of the partnership we have with Honda and this Dispatch editorial highlights recent company announcements that have further strengthened their commitment to Ohio:

Honda has been an important economic partner for Ohio since the company started producing motorcycles in Marysville 31 years ago.

This month, the Japanese automotive giant further solidified its Buckeye presence by announcing it is bringing 50 jobs and its North American sales chief to Marysville, a move that appears to effectively make central Ohio the company’s primary U.S. operations base.

Honda said Friday that it will move the jobs from Southern California to Ohio, tied to its goal to ramp up production so that nearly every vehicle sold in North America also is built here. Tetsuo Iwamura, who heads Honda’s North American sales office in California, will relocate to Marysville to oversee the executive team.

Honda already employs more than 13,500 in Ohio, with more than 10,000 of those in Union and Logan counties. Another 20,000 Ohioans are employed by auto-parts makers whose main customer is Honda.

And

This is just the latest of many recent steps by Honda that have continued the company’s decades-long, mutually beneficial relationship in Ohio. Early last year, Honda announced it had chosen central Ohio as the location in which it would build its new high-end sports car, the Acura NSX — a revival of a $90,000 car built in Japan from 1990 to 2005.

A month later, the company said it planned to invest $98 million and hire an additional 150 workers at its operations in Anna and Russells Point in western Ohio, related to its plan to produce high-tech engines and transmissions for the next-generation Accord.

Together, the two early 2012 announcements brought to more than half a billion dollars within 15 months the amount Honda committed to investing in the state.

And Honda has done all of this without a bailout, returning dozens of times over any public incentives it has received for job creation and expansion over the years.

In 2004, the last time a comprehensive study was done, Honda was found to have an annual economic impact of $36 billion in Ohio.

Honda’s latest moves are more good news in a lasting, growing relationship. It’s good for Honda, which likely will become a net exporter of cars from North America by next year, thanks in large part to its Marysville operations.

And if it’s good for Honda, it’s good for Ohio. The company’s growth here touches not just the companies it directly does business with, but many others that benefit from its activity here and the spending of its employees.

Having such a high-profile success story in the state also helps make the case for Ohio as a good place to do business to the rest of the world.

You can read the entire article here.