Hyundai plans to sell 100,000 cars a year in Australia again

Hyundai plans to return to the 100,000-car annual sales mark in Australia, but that won’t happen overnight.

The CEO of Hyundai Australia, John Kett, recently shared with the media his vision of returning the brand to the sales heights it achieved in 2014, 2015 and 2016. – and that has nothing to do with super cheap drive-in deals or huge car sales.

Its sales have fallen since then, and in 2022 it was beaten by Kia on the full-year sales charts for the first time.

That trend has continued throughout 2023, with Kia currently having 1453 sales ahead of its big brother on the year-to-date VFACTS rankings.

Mr. Kett confirmed what we already knew, telling the media that “we don’t like” when Kia sells more cars.

However, he also expressed caution about going after numbers purely for its sake, arguing that Hyundai “almost killed them all” to hit 100,000 sales in 2016.

“No one makes any money and no one can remember us for that – consumers in particular – because they are all sold to fleets,” said Mr Kett.

Hyundai’s best-selling product in 2016 is i30 bloom (starting price $21,450), followed by SUV Tucson ($27,990) and Accent ($14,990).

Next time Hyundai celebrates 100,000 sales, Mr. Kett said it will be how “customers feel like they’re getting some value” and “our [dealer] The network feels like they’ve made some money.”

Mr. Kett said that with the right supply for the current vehicle line and some additional options for the product line, Hyundai could reach sales of 90,000 to 100,000 vehicles per year.

While he doesn’t want to commit to a fixed deadline, the executive said he hopes to hit annual sales of 100,000 units around 2026.

The key to achieving that number is better supply for city size Location SUVs and new cars are bigger, more expensive Kona.

“We’re playing with a chess set, and we don’t have [supply of] Kona. We never really had it,” Mr. Kett said.

“We were playing with a chess set and we couldn’t get enough Venues, so our car under $35k or $30,000 didn’t have enough. In chess, we’re relying on too few products to get us that number.”

As for the fleet’s role? Mr Kett ruled out “the majority” of sales would come from fleets, calling instead for “additional volume and long-term business relationships”.