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Hyundai sews up car finance tie-up, says it'll compete against Maruti, not Indica

Hyundai Motors India, a subsidiary of the $ 8.24 billion Hyundai Motor Company of South Korea, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Kotak Mahindra Primus and HDFC Bank for launching two new private auto-finance programmes.

These finance programmes will carry the Hyundai brand identity and offered to the Santro customers during the second phase of customer order-taking that begins nationwide from today.

Managing director of Hyundai Motor India Y S Kim, managing director of HDFC Bank Aditya Puri and chief executive officer of Kotak Mahindra Primus Dipak Gupta signed the memoranda of understanding for their respective organisations in Bombay on Monday.

Kim said that as on December 31, 1998, the company has delivered 8,447 Santro cars, with 1,123 in October, 3,444 in November and 3,880 in December of 1998.

The balance orders would be cleared in January 1999 with deliveries for the second round of orders commencing in February. As in the first round of order-taking, the company will accept customer orders in the second phase against the full up-front payment at existing prices of all the three variants of Santro.

Hyundai has maintained the prices of Santro in spite of the launch of Indica by Telco at a competitive price range and heavy slashing of prices by Maruti.

The Madras-based Hyundai's president A P Gandhi has ruled out any reduction in the price of Santro.

"Our prices are competitive and based on future-proof technology and we believe in value-added production," Gandhi said.

The prices of Santro's three models have been fixed in the range of Rs 312,000 to Rs 387,000 which are comparatively higher than the reduced prices of Maruti Zen as well as Telco's Indica.

According to the revised prices announced by Maruti, the prices are ruling in the range of Rs 184,000 to Rs 426,000. Indica's price too stands below Hyundai's in the Rs 259,000 - Rs 390,000 range.

Gandhi remarked that "Indica is non-existent for us", and avoided commenting further. "Our competition is with the market of MUL's Zen-800," he said when pressed, and added that of the total market of 300,000 cars in India, Maruti's sales are estimated to be 200,000 to 225,000. Out of the remaining, Hyundai's marketshare is among the other top car manufacturers.

UNI

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