This paper discusses the impact of B factories in the era of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. It presents the advantages of experiments at a B factory and at a super B factory, and their complementarity to the studies at the LHC. As examples, some selected recent results from B factories are presented; precision measurements of the unitarity triangle, studies of rare B decays, full reconstruction of events in D meson decays and searches for lepton violating τ lepton decays. The paper also reviews the status of the preparation of the next step, a super B factory at KEK, with the SuperKEKB high luminosity asymmetric electron-positron collider and the detector Belle II. Finally a summary and an outlook are given.