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Rakesh Srivastava, senior vice president - marketing and sales, HMIL said that company's market share in exports is around 45%, which makes the company has the largest passenger car exporter in the country.
HMIL's plant near Chennai has been catering to around 127 countires and around ten brands were manufactured here.
India has been the strong export base for Hyundai and for the last nine years HMIL has been number one exporter of passenger cars.
"Export is part of company's business strategy to generate the scale and benchmark high quality and bring in newer products across various segments and countires. But domestic will always remain our priority. To address this market the company will bring in more and more new models, for which the company need to earmark production," said Srivastava, who noted company plans to increase the domestic sales to 4.10 lakh untis from the current 3.80 lakh units.
To compensate the European market, which contributes around 35-40% of country's total exports, he said, countires in Latin America, Asia, Austraila, New Zeland, Middle East and others are opening up.
"We will focus on these markets to offset the loss of European markets volume and to maintain the leadership position," he said.
Currently the ratio of exports to domestic sales is 40:60. "We will increase the volume further in domestic, we should be able to able to scale it to 30:70. This ratio may go back to the old one (40:60) if the new products like Elite i20 performs got good demand in the export markets," he said.
Srivastava said, HMIL's volumes grew by 13% between January and July 2014, which managed to increase its market share by 2.3% to 23% during the same period. He attributed this increase to product innovation, expalnsion of channel partner and others.
The company bets big on the the Elite i20, which will replace old i20 that was launched in 2008. The company stopped the production of the old model, which clocked 7.34 lakh units sales from the time it of launch. The company has been selligng around 3,500 units of i20 a month.
"Elite i20 already got 4,600 bookings, including 2600 petrol and 2,000 diesel, company started bookings in August. The proudct will also be exported," he said.
Queried about HMIL's first model Santro he said the product continues to perform well and logs around 2,600 units sales per month. "This is (the sales) much better than new models launched by competition. The Santro has good demand in North and Western parts of India."
