AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)05/06 Report--

Hyundai Group, South Korea's largest carmaker, will hold an exhibition at the Tokyo station this year and will return to the Japanese market, according to Yahoo in Japan.

Hyundai Motor won a 600-square-meter booth at the Tokyo Motor Show that is comparable in size and scale to local brands or industry giants such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz, according to officials.

Hyundai's business in Japan is only the sales of commercial passenger cars, which entered the Japanese market in 2001 on the then popular Korean idol, selling an average of 2000 new cars a year before 2005, but gradually shrank to 500 directly out of the Japanese market after 2008.

The reason why it is difficult for modern models to survive in Japan lies in the lack of competitiveness of their products in Japanese car companies, as well as political and historical factors. At that time, the Sonata model was launched by competitors of the Camry and Accord, which had a development history of no more than 20 years in terms of technology accumulation. The sales of the latter two topped the list of best-selling models in the United States as early as the 1980s and 1990s.

The label of Hyundai models in Japan is consistent with the cheap image, and the slightly interesting author remembers that in Speed and Furious 3, China and South Korea once said to the protagonist Sean, "am I going to give you a Hyundai?" We can see to what extent South Korean cars have charisma in the eyes of Japanese consumers.

Over the past 10 years, we have seen progress in many aspects of South Korean cars. For example, the Sonata model, which is popular in China, is no longer the image that brought Sonata home 14 years ago. Instead, it can compete with American and Japanese competitors at the same level. Its high-end model Gaines is highly praised in North America and even has the top five levels in consumer word-of-mouth.

However, Japan is relatively cautious about foreign car companies, just like the South Korean population, the first brands chosen by local consumers in Japan are mostly local brands, while high-end brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi have struggled to gain a firm foothold in the Japanese market in the last century.

Japan is one of the main markets in the world for selling 5 million new cars a year, but given that nearly 90 per cent are occupied by domestic brands and considering that most imported cars are European brands, in the Japanese market, which requires only 1,000,000 vehicles a year, this is an uneconomical investment for Hyundai, which requires 8 million vehicles a year.

The model that will enter the Japanese market will be Hyundai NEXO fuel cell models, but given the current Japanese FCV program led by Toyota Honda, it will be difficult to compete with Honda and Toyota. Mirai and Clarity models have been officially launched in the Japanese market for nearly a year, even though the nexo model has a range of 800km and SUV as a selling point, there is no advantage at all.

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