Numbers that led Hyundai to pull the plug on its once bestseller i10

Hyundai Motor India on Thursday announced that it has stopped production of its popular hatchback i10 in the country. The car was launched in India in 2007. 

The company said that the reason for phasing out the car is to shift focus to more premium and modern products.

Till date, Hyundai has sold a total of 16.95 lakh units of the model in domestic as well as global markets.

The once highly popular i10 however has been seeing a slowdown in sales over the past year. 

From high sales of nearly 10,000 units per month after its launch in 2007, recently its sales had dropped down to over 800 units in December 2016.

In fact, sales of Hyundai i10 has not been over 2,500 units of sales during the year. While the car's sales ended at a low in 856 units in December 2016, it sold 2,471 units a month prior to this and 2,450 units in October. 

It also sold 1,389 units during September 2016. Even as back as March 2016 the i10 car sales stood at 1,980 units in March 2016.

The sales of the i10 started to decline after Hyundai launched the i10 Grand in the middle of 2013. i10 Grand managed to clock over 1 lakh units in sales in just 10 months since its launch.

Although Grand i10 was supposed to replace i10, the company continued to sell i10 for a few more years as demand continued to pour in for the model from various quarters, including fleet operators.

For instance, the i10 Grand in the recent February 2017 sales saw a 44.5% growth in sales in comparison to the same month last year and sold 12,862 units during the month. A month earlier it saw a 31% growth in sales as its sales touched a high of 13,010 units in January 2017. In fact the sales of the i10 Grand registered sales of over 10,000 units consecutively over the last one year.

In the festive month of October 2016, i10 Grand's sales rose to a high of 14,530 units. Even during demonetisation it registered sales of 11,059 units, 10,519 units in November and December 2016, respectively.

The reason for Hyundai to also put an end to i10 is its plans to re-introduce an all new Santro into India by 2018. As both the hatchbacks will be in the same price range it would not make sense to keep both in production. 

Hyundai i10, which was priced between Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 5.4 lakh (ex-showroom Mumbai), was lower in comparison to the i10 Grand which is priced at Rs 7.75 lakh. 

The i10 thus falls in the A1 segment which has the hatchbacks priced below Rs 6 lakh. While the i10 Grand falls in the A2 segment which has hatchbacks priced between Rs 6 lakh to Rs 7.5 lakh.

This meant that the i10 competed with top selling cars such as the Maruti Suzuki Celerio, Swift, Tata Tiago, Maruti Suzuki WagonR, Renault Kwid, Maruti Suzuki Ignis, among others.

Maruti Suzuki's Celerio which is priced at Rs 4.33 lakh (ex-showroom Mumbai) had seen a 61.9% rise in sales during February 2017 as it sold 8,315 units during the month. In January it sold 10,879 units and in December 2016 it sold 7,189 units. Over the last few months been close to 9,000 units.

Another competitor car for the i10 has been the Tata Tiago, which despite a rocky start last year, has managed to become the highest sales for Tata Motors over the last few months. In February 2017 its saw a 389% year on year growth in sales as it sold 5,365 units. 

In January too it managed to sell 5,399 units. While impact of demonetisation had seen its sales fall to 4,013 units during December 2016, it managed to sell over 6,000 units in the October and November 2016.

Maruti Suzuki's Swift and WagonR, on the other hand, have been one of the most popular cars till date and have clocked in sales of 14,000 units on an average month on month over the last year. Ignis which was launched 2 months ago managed to record sales over 4,000 units in both months.

Renault Kwid too has been one of the most popular cars recently. During February itself its sales rose to 27.8% as it sold 9,648 units during the month.

i10 lost out to the market which have seen newer models come out and take a larger share of the market.