Hyundai revives Santro brand in small car battle with Maruti
CHENNAI: Hyundai Motor Co. will bring back its popular small car brand Santro in India as the country’s secondlargest auto maker by marketshare seeks to intensify its competition with Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and others in this segment.
The Santro will go on sale later this month, coinciding with Hyundai’s completion of two decades of operations.
The latest car will be a completely new model of the Santro, which first went on sale in September 1998, before it was phased out in 2014.
Hyundai’s decision to reintroduce the Santro brand is considered a crucial attempt by the company to claw back marketshare it lost to rivals in the small car segment with the key being Maruti Suzuki, the country’s largest car maker. The company also realises that building a brand in India from scratch is an uphill task and not many, including some of the leading companies, could manage it successfully.
The Santro will also have to compete with models from Renault and Tata Motors among others.
The new Santro will be Hyundai’s first new model in the small car segment after nearly six years. It had introduced the Eon small car model in October 2012. The new Santro is also Hyundai’s first new model after the 2015 launch of Creta, a sport-utility vehicle.
The time has come for Hyundai to enter or re-enter the segment where the company has no presence at the moment, said YK Koo, MD, Hyundai Motor India Ltd. With the introduction of the Santro, the company will have a formidable line up of products, he said.
Hyundai expects to manufacture 8,000 to 10,000 units of the new Santro each month, and achieve a 17% market share in the domestic market this financial year. Its market share has been stagnant at around 16.5% in the past two years due to the lack of new products in the mass market segment and production constraints at its factory complex in Chennai.
Over the same period, Maruti Suzuki expanded its domestic market share from 47% to 51% as of last financial year. The introduction of the Santro comes at a time of subdued automobile demand in the country due to worsening macro-economic factors such as increased crude oil prices and the weakening of the rupee, which have hit consumer sentiment.
Koo is however undeterred by the prevailing negative sentiments in the market. He expects the new Santro to help Hyundai gain at least 30% of the compact car segment as it will also attract a lot of firsttime car buyers.
The new Santro will be produced in Chennai and shipped across geographies in Europe, Latin America and Africa.