Hyundai creates a premium brand

Automotive News agency, citing the American office of Hyundai, reports that the Koreans decided to create a premium brand under which the company's top models will be produced.

As previously expected, new names will receive the representative of the Equus sedan, the Genesis business class car and a compartment with the same name. So far there is no confirmed information, all of them will be combined under the Genesis brand, and cars will be denoted by numbers, like most modern Hyundai models. Later, the line will be expanded, probably due to the large crossover.

The Korean company decided to follow the path of Japanese colleagues: Toyota, for example, has a Lexus brand, which until recently was very successful, including in the Russian market. Nissan has Infiniti, Honda - Acura, but under this brand cars are officially sold only in the USA.

In the crisis of Hyundai, as in fact and before other automakers, the task was to survive, and not to create subbrands, so the project was frozen. Now, apparently, the company has coped with the consequences of the crisis. True, they are not going to organize a separate dealer network for their premium brand in Hyundai. Cars will be sold in the same show rooms as ordinary models, notes BFM .

Whether the premium brand Genesis will appear in Russia is still unknown. On the one hand, Hyundai is increasingly trying to position itself not as a manufacturer of mass cars, but as a high -tech company, with a wide model row. On the other hand, it would be nice to offer more sophisticated Russian consumers than three models with a new nameplate.

In 2011, 74 Genesis vehicles were sold in Russia, and 162 people preferred the Equus representative sedan, but the sales of an accessible Solaris model reached almost 100 thousand. "For Hyundai, it would be logical to bring a new premium brand and to the Russian market. Moreover, the better, the better. The question is in customer psychology. The owner of Solaris certainly flatters that Hyundai has such a model as Equus, but I'm not sure that Equus customers are glad to see in its ranks of owners of affordable Solaris," says Alexander Kataev, editor of the test group of magazines "Automir" and Quattroruote.