Hyundai to target China, other emerging markets

South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor said Tuesday its strategy for weathering the financial storm was to expand its production of small, fuel-efficient cars for China and other emerging markets.

Demand for Hyundai's small cars is expected to rise to 60 percent of its global sales in 2009 from 55 percent this year, Yoon Mong-hyun, the company's managing director in business strategy planning, told Hong Kong media.

"We are going to expand sales in the emerging markets. By doing so, we will be able to minimise our exposure to the developed countries," he said.

Yoon said the company has been designing exclusive models for China, whose demand for small cars was expected to increase from 41 percent in 2007 to 47 percent of global sales in 2009.

The company also unveiled designs of its first gas-electric hybrid cars.

Yang Woong-chui, senior executive vice-president of the company, said it was not too late for the company to enter the hybrid vehicle market and claimed it had a much simpler, user-friendly design than Japanese rival Toyota, which developed its hybrid cars years earlier.

"It's about time we get on the boat -- I don't think we are too late," he said.

Yoon said the company would set up production plants in Russia and Brazil in 2011, after it opened its latest overseas plant in the Czech Republic earlier this month.

But he refused to give an estimate on the impact the crisis-hit economies in the US and Europe would make on sales next year, saying only that the firm was prepared for all three scenarios: optimistic, baseline, and pessimistic.

In October, the company announced it would cut the production at its plant in the US because of shrinking demand there.