Hyundai Motor India posts record September sales, aims for market outperformance in 2023

As the Indian market continues to scale to a new peak, Hyundai Motor India, the South Korean car maker is riding the wave with its new range of SUVs which has helped the company post its highest ever monthly sales of 71641 units. This is a growth of 13 percent over total sales (domestic plus exports) of last year.

While the domestic dispatches stood at 54,241 units, the exports for September stood at 17400 units. This was the second highest domestic monthly wholesale for the company, after September of 2020.

Tarun Garg, COO, Hyundai Motor India told Autocar Professional, the company has outpaced the market with a growth of 9 percent so far this year and he sees all the key parameters of demand, production ramp, stock in the system to be favorable to deliver a strong festive season for the company.

"The ongoing festive season has resulted in a strong sales momentum, helping us achieve more than 9% growth YoY in domestic sales in September 2023. Our strong SUV portfolio has received a further boost with the exceptional customer response to the newly launched Hyundai Exter. SUVs now contribute to more than 65% of our domestic sales. The enduring love and admiration by Indian customers for Brand Hyundai is a reflection of the benchmark set by our products in terms of safety & feature integration,” said Garg in a statement.

While the overall passenger vehicle market is estimated to have grown by about 2-3 percent in September to about 3.65 lakh units, Hyundai Motor has sustained its 9 percent growth momentum.

Hyundai Motor India is still sitting on an order book position of 1.15 lakh units with the increased output it is hoping to reduce the waiting period.

These high numbers have been helped by the additional capacity of 50000 units which was added during the year and a significant part of it has gone into producing higher output for its new SUV Exter, which clocked a sale of 8500 units.

Thanks to the increased output the quarterly sales have moved up from 1.47 lakh to 1.5 lakh units to almost 1.6 lakh units for Q3 of 2023. Even with the increased output, the capacity utilization of its Sriperumbudur factory continues to be over 95 percent.

Garg says the company has a healthy stock of 20-25 days, which will ensure adequate stock for customers to get deliveries during the upcoming Navratri, Dussehra and Diwali festivals.

While the majority of factors are favorable even the challenge of El Nino appears to be only marginal, Garg believes the headwinds of interest rates and crude prices still prevails and the global challenges are only mounting - so that may have an impact going ahead, but on its part Hyundai is on course of a record year in 2023, with plans of growing by 8 to 9 percent.