April 26, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] Hyundai Motor said on Jan. 24 it will set up a joint venture with a Vietnamese company to boost sales in the emerging market.

The Korean carmaker and Thanh Cong Group signed an initial agreement to establish a sales JV that will be tasked with selling 100,000 vehicles in Vietnam by 2020, the company said in a statement.

For the whole of 2018, Hyundai’s vehicle sales more than doubled to 55,924 units in the key Southeast Asian market compared with a year earlier. It ranked second in the local automobile market with a share of 19.4 percent after Toyota Motor, the statement said.

Vietnam’s automobile sector jumped 27 percent to 287,949 units last year from 226,120 in the previous year, it said. 

To help meet the sales goal, Hyundai said it will expand its plant in Vietnam to 100,000 units by 2020 from the current 60,000.

In a production JV with Thanh Cong, Hyundai has been bringing complete knockdown units from its plants in Korea since 2011 for assembly at the Vietnamese assembly line for sales in the country. 

Hyundai Thanh Cong Manufacturing Vietnam has assembled models that include the i10 mini car, the Accent subcompact, Elantra compact, and Tucson and Santa Fe SUVs, the statement said.

By Song Seung-hyun and newswires (ssh@heraldcorp.com)