Michael Cole, the first non-Korean top boss at Hyundai Europe, helped the automaker to increase its market share by a full point in the first half. He did so with help from new products such as the full-electric Ioniq 5 and careful management of Hyundai's order bank to offset supply chain disruption. Cole is optimistic that Hyundai will continue to succeed in the second half despite the first signs of softening demand. He discussed this and more with Automotive News Europe Associate Publisher & Editor Luca Ciferri and Correspondent Andrea Malan.
Hyundai bucked Europe's downward trend, increasing first-half year sales 14 percent and boosting market share a full point to 4.7 percent. Did you expect such strong results?
In terms of sales, we are pretty much where we planned to be. And we wanted to grow our market share as we leveraged some great new products, particularly with the Ioniq 5's first full year on the market. However, we did not expect that volume would give us a 4.7 percent share. We didn't expect the overall market would be as low as it has been.