Korean Hyundai Motor Group to expand investment in Vietnam

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Hyundai Motor (South Korea) and Thanh Cong Group have just reached an agreement to start a new joint venture to expand production and assembly of Hyundai passenger cars. The move is part of the Hyundai Motor Group’s strategy to expand its production globally.

After nearly 8 years of manufacturing, assembling and distributing different types of Hyundai passenger cars in Vietnam, Hyundai Thanh Cong, a subsidiary of Thanh Cong Group, has demonstrated its large capacity and a high sense of resolve in the context of fierce competitiveness of the Vietnamese market.

Deputy Chairman of the Hyundai Motor Group at the factory in Vietnam.

In 2015 and 2016, Hyundai Thanh Cong’s passenger cars had at least 18% of the Vietnamese car market share, ranked second in the market. It also won the title “Distributor of the Year” from the Hyundai Motor Group in 2014 and 2015.

The joint venture to expand production and assembly of passenger cars between Thanh Cong Group and Hyundai Motor in Vietnam has been established before 2018, an important time, when import taxes on completely built up cars from ASEAN countries stand at 0% under the ASEAN Free trade Agreement.

The move is an important step of Hyundai helping effectively compete with other car brands that are moving their imports from other ASEAN markets into Vietnam. Additionally, it creates a good opportunity for Thanh Cong Group to cooperate with other domestic and foreign enterprises in developing an auxiliary industry network in Ninh Binh province, in line with the Vietnamese Government’s automobile industry development plan.

In the first phase, the joint venture will continue running the current Hyundai Thanh Cong in the northern province of Ninh Binh with a production and assembly capacity of 40,000 passenger cars per year.

In the coming time, the factory will be expanded and equipped with world-level modern manufacturing technologies by Hyundai Group. Accordingly,  almost all production stages will be automatic or semi-automatic with the use of robots, so that all products will have the same quality, meeting Hyundai Motor Group’s standards.

With this expansion project, the rate  of CKD (Completely Knocked Down) of two Hyundai products assembled in Vietnam, namely Hyundai SantaFe and Hyundai Elantra will increased from 20% to 70-80% in 2017 and up to 90% in 2018.