Founded in 1967 as an assembler of Ford, Hyundai Motor Co. (HMC) has steadily developed and accumulated technological and new product development capabilities with an aim to export its products by achieving technological independence. After taking over of Kia Motors in 1999, Hyundai-Kia Motor Group (HKM) accomplished a remarkable growth to become the world's top five auto makers in 2010 through improvement of quality and globalization of operation. Considering the highly competitive characteristics of mature and oligoplolistic automobile industry, HKM’s successful entry into the global automobile market and its rapid growth in recent years are enough to draw a keen attention of researchers. In this paper, we present the analyses on HKM from the holistic perspectives of technology catch-up, quality improvement, and globalization to shed light on the backgrounds of rapid growth of HKM. We highlighted important events that had taken place over the initial and sensitive periods in order to illustrate their long lasting impacts on forming corporate culture including unique management style. We tried to describe HKM case as objectively as possible by relying on historical facts and figures from credible sources, such as audited financial statements, annual reports, reports from research institutions, cross-checked interviews, etc.