Hyundai Motor, which includes the Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis car brands, posted its third-quarter financial results today, and it’s good news for the Korean automaker.
The car manufacturer posted a record Q3 operating profit of $2.8 billion (KRW 3.82 trillion), up a whopping 146 percent from last year’s third quarter, while net profits more than doubled to $2.4 billion (KRW 3.3 trillion). At the same time, the operating profit margin reached 9.3 percent, more than double the 4.1 percent recorded in the previous year.
Mind you, these results are for the company as a whole, including the internal combustion-engined side of things, but electric cars were credited by Hyundai as being one of the reasons behind its expansion, along with higher sales for SUVs and Genesis models. In total, the Korean car group sold almost 169,000 electrified vehicles, including hybrid and all-electric, which is a 33 percent increase from last year.
With such a good previous quarter, Hyundai Motor is chugging away with its expansion plans that will see the Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands offer as many as 31 EVs by 2030. Sales are expected to further increase in the coming quarters, including for battery-powered cars, and the company doesn’t see major production cuts as it moves forward.
By comparison, Ford and General Motors, which are considered two of the biggest players in the automotive industry, announced that they’ll delay or abandon some of their EV production goals citing a slowdown in EV adoption, slowing sales growth, rising labor costs, and a bleak economic outlook.
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Ford’s Model E business unit, which is responsible for EVs, pushed back the goal of producing 600,000 battery-powered vehicles to next year, while General Motors abandoned its 400,000-unit EV production run rate from 2022 through mid-2024.
“We do not plan to dramatically reduce EV production or our line-up due to likely near-term hurdles as we believe EV sales will grow longer term,” Seo Gang Hyun, Hyundai Motor’s Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, told analysts at the company’s earnings briefing, according to Reuters.
By the end of the decade, the Korean automaker aims to increase its yearly EV output to 1.51 million in its home country, while on the global stage, Hyundai wants to see 3.64 million battery-powered vehicles roll off its production lines during the same time frame.
In the long term, it wants to become one of the world’s top three electric car producers. To make this happen, Hyundai Motor Group will spend some $18.2 billion (KRW 24 trillion) until 2030 to ramp up production and bring new models such as the Hyundai Ioniq 7 and Kia EV9 to the market.