Hyundai India launches Getz compact car
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's second biggest carmaker, Hyundai Motor India Ltd., launched its Getz compact car in the country on Friday and priced it attractively to boost its share of the fast growing compact car segment.
The wholly owned unit of South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co., in India since October 1998, said the GL version of the Getz is priced at 450,000 rupees ($9,719) in Delhi while a GLS version would be for 475,000 rupees.
Powered by a 1.3 litre petrol engine, the Getz will be made at Hyundai's plant on the outskirts of Madras with a local parts content of over 65 percent. The share of locally made parts will rise to 80 percent in a year.
Hyundai also makes the Santro hatchback, the Accent, the Elantra and Sonata sedans in Madras. In April-July, it had a 15 percent share of the Indian car market, behind market leader Maruti Udyog's 51 percent and Tata Motors' 19 percent.
"We expect a continuing influx of customers into the compact car segment, which is the biggest," Byong Ho Sung, Hyundai India's managing director, said at a news conference. "This car will introduce a totally new benchmark in the segment."
The Getz is positioned in the compact car segment, that contributed 53 percent of the nearly 700,000 cars sold in India in the past business year to March, and is priced at its top end.
Hyundai estimated demand for the Getz at nearly 2,000 units a month, but said sales would be constrained by capacity bottlenecks as the car shared the same production line as the Accent Viva, the Elantra and the Sonata.
The automaker said the Getz would eat into the share of some high-price compacts like the Fiat Palio, Corsa Sail from General Motors and some low-price sedans like Maruti's Esteem, the Ford Ikon and the Indigo from Tata Motors.
Hyundai estimated the size of top-end compact cars at about 2,500 cars a month in urban markets.
The company's total vehicle sales jumped 24 percent to 59,251 vehicles in April-July, the first four months of this business year, and expects full year sales of 235,000 units, including exports of 70,000.
Hyundai India President B.V.R. Subbu said the company had invested 2.1 billion rupees to launch the Getz, including in a new engine line. An expansion programme to increase capacity to 250,000 units will be completed by the end of the year.
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