No more in race of small cars in India: Hyundai CEO

India's second largest passenger car maker Hyundai Motors on Wednesday said enough was enough with the competition in small product segment as the quality and branding takes the center stage of the company's growth strategy in the country.

"Many players launch many small products in Rs 3-4 lakh price bracket while our average price is Rs 7 lakh. We can not fight this kind of a competition as we focus more on quality and branding to position ourselves as a modern premium brand in India," Hyundai Motor India Limited (HMIL) managing director and CEO Young Key Koo told reporters.

No new product can be expected from the company's stable in the small product segment even as its small car offering, Eon, may not be able to sustain the 300,000 unit sales figure going forward, according to him.

Koo, who was here to inaugurate four new dealerships in the city, told reporters that their ultimate goal was to position Hyundai as a 'modern premium brand' and accordingly the corporate identity and the showroom space identity was going to be changed completely by the year 2018.

Despite the proposed shift in focus in terms of products and positioning, Hyundai remains a mass player and will also retain the current market share in the country, said HMIL chief, who took charge in November last year.

Sounding bullish on SUV market on the back of more than expected sales performance of Creta, Koo said SUV was the right product for India considering the country's large territory as well as the road conditions. According to him, Hyundai will launch two new products every year and the new compact SUV Tucson, which is slated to be launched later this year, will be priced between Creta and Santa Fe. Launch of a passenger car, a sedan, is also in the pipeline this year.

The company sold 68,000 units of Creta SUV as against 1.10 lakh bookings from its launch in July last year till March 31, 2016 and its production will be doubled to 20,000 per month as compared to the present 10,000 level from June, 2016. About 20 per cent of the total sales volume is now coming from Creta.

Last year the company sold 6.43 lakh cars in all segments with an overall market share of 17.3 per cent. This year the company expects a sales growth of around 8 per cent, still way above the industry's expected growth rate of two per cent, according to the company CEO. Hyundai aims to sell 6.65 units in the current year most of which in the domestic market as exports were expected to come down to around 120,000 units from the previous 167,000 units due to the slowdown in the middle east and Africa.

The company launched three new dealerships based on Global Dealership Space Identity (GDSI) with a showroom space ranging from 7,000 sft to 13,000 sft of showroom space besides a digital outlet with an area of 4,300 sft, featuring the portfolio of all the 10 products of the company.