14 April 2013

Kia has voiced ambitions for a place among the top five UK car brands. Off the back of best-ever first quarter figures of 19,204 vehicles sold January-March, Kia UK president Paul Philpott has set out plans for the next seven years.

While he doesn’t see the UK market growing above 2.1m annual sales ‘for the next 10 years’, he nevertheless expects to be shifting 100,000 cars a year by 2020.

Kia’s latest sales results represent a jump from a year ago: January-March 2012, the company sold 17,211 cars in the UK. Short term, its ambitions are reined back by production capacity.

‘All our plants are running flat out,’ said Mr Philpott, ‘and if this continues then there will have to be a decision within the next 18 months to two years about increasing capacity. Until then we will concentrate on improving quality even more and retaining our existing customers.’

Kia has 172 retailers and plans to add another dozen by filling open points, particularly close to London.’ These are high-cost areas so not easy to fill, but potentially high volume,’ Mr Philpott told headlineauto.co.uk.

Kia also wants existing dealers to plan for more servicing and repair work, pointing out that while there are 220,000 of its cars in the UK now, that figure will more than double by the end of the decade.

Tags: annual sales, brand plans, Kia, Paul Philpott, production, Top 5, top five