On Thursday, Kia India announced it had become the swiftest brand to cross the country’s three lakh cumulative sales mark. The brand, which markets models like Seltos and Sonet, crossed one lakh sales milestone in July 2020, the next one lakh in January 2021, and the third lakh in August 2021.
The company Kia climbed up in less than two years to accomplish the milestones. The brand delivered the first one lakh unit sales in one year and measured the latter two lakh in the same amount of time, importing the high adoption rate of Kia cars among Indian customers, Kia India stated in a statement. The flagship product of the automaker, Seltos, endures the highest contributor with 66 percent share. At the same time, Sonet added 32 percent to the sales. Besides, the brand sold 7,310 units of its premium offering, the Carnival, during the period.
Kia India Managing Director and CEO Kookhyun Shim remarked, ‘Three lakh sales for Kia India is a strong declaration of customer acceptance and their confidence in the brand and its offerings. Despite testing times, the Indian market has shown a strong rebound in demand. He added that its extensive sales, after-sales service network, and pre-emptive measures like an end-to-end digitized sales process maintained it to minimize business risks and perform against all odds.
‘Over the last years, we have carefully identified the unmet needs of Indian customers and catered to them with premium, well-designed products equipped with segment-first features. We are confident that our best in class products and ownership experience will continue to exhilarate our customers,’ Shim stated. Since its entry in India, Kia focussed on diminishing the gap between affordable and luxury, with an extensive choice of exceptions per model at an optimal price range, giving the brand enormous market acceptance, the automaker remarked.
To extend its reach, the brand strives to enlarge its footprint from the current 300 to 360 touchpoints, covering 90 percent of the Indian market, including Tier-III, IV, and upcountry markets. The Seltos became the 3,00,000th car to circle out from the company’s manufacturing facility in Anantapur, which employs over 13,000 employees. Over the past two years, Kia has spent over USD 2 billion, including the vendor park created near the plant. In April 2017, Kia India endorsed a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh government to construct a new manufacturing facility at the Anantapur district. The South Korean automaker began mass production in August 2019 and had an annual production capacity of about three lakh units.
