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Sonata-strong Hyundai eyeing Rs 1.2 million segment

Hyundai Motor India Limited is planning to position its luxury segment offering Sonata in the Rs 1.2 million segment while the multi-utility vehicle Sportage would be priced in the range of Rs 900,000, a senior company executive said.

The company is currently exploring the feasibility of introducing the two models next year, J H Kim, HMIL executive director (marketing and sales), said.

''Although the final price tags and launch dates for the vehicles are yet to be finalised, we are looking at a price positioning of Rs 1.2 million for Sonata and Rs 900,000 for Sportage,'' he added.

The company had shortlisted Sonata and Sportage as its next offerings for India following tremendous customer response for the two models at the recently-held Auto Expo 2000.

''We were testing waters with four models -- Sonata, Sportage, Grandeur-XG and Starlex. But the market feedback pointed out a clear preference for Sonata and Sportage. We have initiated a study to examine the launch schedule and other finer details.''

Meanwhile, the company has targetted to achieve an export turnover of Rs 2 billion for the year 2000 through shipments of both components and completely built units of Santro and Accent. This would mark a 300 per cent surge from Rs 500 million achieved in 1999.

Although components would account for a major chunk of the export basket, he could not give the exact distribution between components and CBUs.

HMIL, Kim said, has targetted to export 10,000 units of Santro and Accent in 2000. In addition, 78,000 units would be sold in the domestic market in the year, including 66,000 units of Santro and 12,000 units of Accent.

''We had last year exported Santro to Nepal. For this year, we have got enquiries from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, West Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia. We expect Accent to account for larger sales abroad than Santro this year,'' he added.

Kim said HMIL has achieved 11 per cent marketshare in 1999 and expects to ramp it up to 15 per cent this year. In January, 2000, the company sold a total of 8,645 passenger cars, including 7,402 units of Santro and 1,243 units of Accent.

''This year is expected to be quite good for the auto industry and we expect to meet our sales targets for the current fiscal. We had targetted to sell 1,000 units of Accent per months and will exceed it.''

In the April-January period of the current fiscal, the company has sold 60,675 units, including 56,000 units of Santro.

HMIL has an installed capacity of 120,000 units at its Maraimallai Nagar plant near Madras. ''We expect to achieve optimum utilisation, on a three-shift basis, in the year 2001,'' Kim said.

Meanwhile, Samara Hyundai today became the first Hyundai dealership in the country to achieve the sales landmark of 5,000 units since the beginning of national deliveries in October 1998.

The 5000th car was handed over to Gulshan Kumar Khurana of BHEL.

Hyundai, with aggregate sales of over 77,000 cars, set a record by crossing the 75,000-mark in the country in a span of just 15 months of operations.

HMIL is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the $ 8.24 billion Hyundai Motor Company of South Korea.

UNI

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