Korean chaebol Hyundai Motor India, India’s second largest car maker, on Friday said that it will launch two products every year for the next few years and will focus on launching products with automatic transmission, hybrid and sub-4 metre SUVs.
YK Koo, managing director and CEO, Hyundai Motor India while addressing visiting journalists at its plant near Chennai said: “Our focus will be launching modern premium brands. We are evaluating introducing AMT, hybrids and sub-4 metre SUVs to increase our market share sharply from 17% now. Every year we will launch 2 new products, to give customers a wide choice to choose from. For the current year, we have lined up a model above Creta and an executive product below Creta. Both the products will be launched during festive season of 2016.”
On the plant capacity, Koo said: “We can extend the current production capacity from 6.5 lakh to 7.1 or little above. As Middle East and South America markets are currently under stress, we will focus more on domestic market. However we will explore these two markets with newer products as these two are important regions for us.”
Hyundai had invested $3.1 billion in India since inception and vendors together had invested another $1.5 billion. “Cumulatively we have exported 23.56 lakh cars from India and sold close 42 lakh cars in India,” he said.
Speaking to the FE on the sidelines, Rakesh Srivatsava, senior vice-president (sales & marketing), HMIL, said: “We are currently working on introducing sub-4 metre SUV in India. We have asked our R&D department in India as well our parent in Korea to design and develop a new SUV, which can take on market leaders and set a new trend.
However, it takes at least two years for the same. We have also plans to introduce AMT models of existing as well new products. We have the technology globally and we are evaluating the same for its introduction.”
