The Belle II experiment belongs to a new generation of B-factories, and it is located at the SuperKEKB collider. Its goal is to collect an integrated luminosity of 50 ab-1, corresponding to a data sample that is 50 times larger than the one collected by its predecessor Belle. From February to July 2018, the machine has completed a commissioning run, achieving a peak luminosity of 5.5 × 1033 cm-2 s-1, and a data sample of about 0.5 fb-1 has been recorded. Belle II is capable of studying the so-called XYZ states with unprecedented precision: heavy exotic hadrons consisting of more than three quarks. First discovered by Belle, these now number in the dozens, and represent the emergence of a new category within quantum chromodynamics. In this paper, a general introduction to the experiment is presented, together with the perspectives for studies of conventional and exotic quarkonium-like states.