Hyundai May Be The Fox In The Hen House, But Who Is The Chicken?

Chrysler. One foot in the grave, the other on a bananna peel.

I like your expression.

LOL thstone, +1

Hyundai is only one of three brands that have shown any appreciable overall growth in this anemic recessionary economy. They are obviously doing something right to keep them competitive in space against their leading competitors.

"Just as McDonald's and Wal-Mart have found favor from consumers during the recession, so, too, is Hyundai" - well that explains it !

Of course their sales increase. We are in a recession. In a recession, people buy cheaper lower quality products because they have to. Same rule explains why Spam now outsells Steak in this economy. People don't prefer Spam, it is just cheaper.

Good points StarSearch and PerformanceGuy, except if "price" was the only reason they were selling cars, that could not logically explain their on track growth of 7% in the U.S. market this year, since both Honda and Toyota compete quite well in the same space as Hyundai. Globally, Hyundai is ranked 4th in the world.

Selling on price alone is a risky proposition for any business, especially an automotive brand and it is not the reason why Hyundai is selling cars. If price was the only equation, they would have faded long before the recession started to take hold because of the price points in their current model line-up.

Instead consumers have started to respond to their quality/value proposition in return for dollars exchanged and are indeed voting with their dollars for Hyundai branded cars like Genesis.

Both Toyota and Honda have larger footprints here in the U.S. market, so it is not unexpected that they would enjoy a larger spike in August sales, credited in large part to the cash for clunkers program. Another factor is that Hyundai lacks the larger dealer distribution networks of both these well established Asian brands.

But if you look at the 2009 numbers for both Honda and Toyota their year-over-year unit sold numbers are off by at least 25%-30%
points.

If you do some further fact checking 2009 has seen negligible growth for both Toyota and Honda in terms of per units sold, while quite the opposite has been true for Hyundai, with growth holding steady at around 8% percentage points.

As mentioned earlier, If it were only based on price, they would not be able to sell $33k plus priced cars like Genesis which is on track to hit 20k units by the end of this year.