In the utility car section, the quickest rising automotive class in India, Hyundai Motor Company, with its two manufacturers, has comprehensively edged previous Maruti Suzuki, the section and market chief.
Hyundai Motor India, alongside group firm Kia Motors, accounted for one in each three autos bought in April within the highly-competitive UV market.
This section, which noticed cumulative gross sales of 1,000,000 models in 2020-21, is the largest driver of progress for India-based automakers.
In May, as lockdowns impacted gross sales throughout the nation and firms shut down manufacturing at a lot of their crops, Hyundai and sister model Kia — each owned by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Company — collectively overtook the entire passenger car gross sales of Maruti Suzuki for the primary time ever.
While Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL) bought 32,903 models within the home market in May, the Korean gamers, using largely on SUV gross sales, recorded mixed gross sales of 36,051 models.
It stays to be seen if this pattern continues as soon as car supply pipelines normalise, nonetheless. Most retail channels have been closed in May, and Maruti had gone right into a plant shutdown earlier than Hyundai.
In April 2021, MSIL had the largest market share within the UV section at 23 per cent, adopted by Hyundai Motor India and Kia Motors at 22 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. Together, nonetheless, Hyundai and Kia had 37 per cent market share within the section, having bought a mixed 39,936 UVs in that month.
The change within the pecking order has successfully pushed down the opposite two key gamers within the section, Mahindra and Tata Motors. Toyota, which has the bestseller Innova, has been a lot decrease down within the quantity sport (round 7 per cent market share in April), though the addition of the rebadged Maruti Suzuki Brezza has helped it rev up the numbers in latest months.
While Maruti Suzuki has been pushed down in May, the numbers for the month have been impacted by market distortions on account of the retail shutdowns throughout most states, with analysts saying they might wait to see if the pattern continues as soon as the supply pipeline smoothens.
But at the same time as Kia’s all-UV product vary has helped add to the tally, Hyundai has additionally been growing its choices, each by way of fashions and variants — the brand new 5-seater Creta is the newest bestseller, and a 7-seater model is about to hit the roads quickly. Kia can be launching merchandise in the identical worth bracket of Rs 8-18 lakh.
Shashank Srivastava, ED at Maruti Suzuki stated that whereas within the MPV section, the place MSIL has merchandise just like the Ertiga and XL6, the Japanese firm is forward, it’s now behind within the mid-SUV section.
“The mid-SUV segment has a lot of diesel products and we don’t have a diesel vehicle. We have Brezza and S-Cross, and product development is a continuous process,” he stated.
It is, nonetheless, vital to notice that whereas the mixed market share of Hyundai and Kia works at a gaggle stage, the 2 manufacturers are rivals in varied markets, together with India. A senior official with Hyundai Motor India stated the corporate “competes aggressively” with Kia Motor India — and whereas there could also be some synergy on the group stage on sharing of the product platform, the 2 firms have their very own administration, product design, R&D, advertising and repair channels, and shouldn’t be seen as one.
Industry insiders, nonetheless, say that the success of the Creta led Hyundai Motor Company to introduce the Kia model in India to capitalise on demand within the untapped SUV market. Kia entered India two years in the past, and launched Seltos in August 2019.
Sources say that when Creta was launched in 2015, the corporate was anticipating month-to-month gross sales of round 4,000. In April 2021, Hyundai and Kia collectively bought practically 40,000 UVs, virtually 10 occasions that quantity.
As per information with SIAM, in April 2021, UV gross sales stood at 108,871 models out of whole passenger car gross sales of 261,633 models, thus accounting for a market share of 41.6 per cent. The UV share in passenger car gross sales in India has doubled over the past 5 years — from 21 per cent in 2015-16, it had risen to round 36 per cent in September 2019, and has witnessed a pointy spike over the past 6-7 months.
Kia launched Sonnet in September 2020, and Hyundai India launched its new Creta in March 2020.