Hyundai To Shift Manufacturing i20 To Turkey
Hyundai India will now ship its i20 CKD units to Turkey for assembling the models in Europe. It will save on import duties making the car cheaper and more competitive in the European markets. Hyundai i20 is an extremely successful model in Europe and HMIL currently exports both 5-door and 3-door models to European countries.
"As of now the i20 cars are being manufactured from Chennai plant and going forward we will move part of i20 production to Turkey to meet the growing demand for this car in Europe and other countries. We're moving only the three-door production, while the five-door will continue from here. We will send them out as completely knocked down kits (CKDs) and initially a batch of 50,000 units would be shipped out. We foresee that the export demand for i20 in 2010 will shoot up and then we cannot meet the increasing demand just from India alone," said Hyundai spokesperson.
Hyundai also stated that it will continue manufacturing the car in India only but will export the CKD units to save on import duties. It also said that it will vacate the assembly line for manufacturing other popular models of cars in India. Hyundai faced severe labour problems in Chennai last year and it had tough time dealing with the situation. Then, it had announced that it will shift its part manufacturing capacity elsewhere in Europe.