Study of the market entry and growth strategy of Hyundai vis-a-vis other foreign players in the Indian Automobile market

Abstract

The objective of this project is to study and analyze the successful entry of Hyundai in the Indian passenger vehicle segment in order to understand why some foreign Original Equipment Manufacturers, also called as OEMs, (like Hyundai and Honda) have been successful in the Indian market, while a host of others, like Ford, GM, VW, Skoda etc have not been able to do so well.We started by studying about the Indian automobile industry and specifically about the passenger vehicle segment within the industry. We had also been exposed to a number of frameworks relating to internationalization and expansion to emerging markets as a part of the course Understanding Global Organizational Context, and we were able to draw from them aptly in this project. However, we found the framework developed by Landau et al, around business model innovation of Autolux in Inda, particularly interesting and relevant to our project theme.We have devoted much of our focus and energy to testing the same framework for Hyundai‟s India entry. Primarily, data was collected from secondary sources for this purpose. However, as a part of this exercise, and also involving certain insights we were able to develop via the primary route, we have also developed an understanding about what has differentiated the successful foreign OEMs from the ones that have not performed so well, besides studying how Hyundai evolved its business model for the India entry, how the same differed from that of Autolux, and what explains these differences, if any.Interestingly, as a part of understanding differences between Autolux‟ and Hyundai‟s business model innovations, we have also developed thoughts around a possible extension of the framework developed by Landau et al, applicable for companies that have expanded successfully to an emerging market geography and operate in mass market products.We hope that our work will add value to the sparse literature available in the domain of business model innovation while expanding to emerging markets, since our work has further tested a framework developed in this domain (by Landau et al) in the same sector (Indian passenger vehicle) but a different segment (not super luxury products, unlike Autolux), and presents a hypothesis that can potentially extend this framework.