By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter

Hyundai Motor announced Thursday it will start to build a plant in Brazil November, meaning the company will have a production line up in all of the rapid-growing BRIC countries.

The 100,000-vehicle capacity plant, to be built near Sao Paolo in 2011, will manufacture flex fuel cars, which can use both gasoline and bio-ethanol, the automaker said. Duel-fueled vehicles account for about 75 percent of all vehicles in Brazil.

Hyundai's vice chairman Kim Dong-jin left for Brazil Wednesday to sign the construction deal, reported Maeil Business Newspaper, a local Korean daily.

Small-sized sedans will be the main product of the new facility to meet demand of the local Brazilian and North American markets, Hyundai said.

With the new plant, Hyundai will have production centers in all emerging markets. Currently the maker is running two plants in China and India, respectively, and recently broke ground for one to be built in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2011.

Hyundai's aggressive foreign investment is in line with the company's long-term goal to expand its overall capacity to 6 million vehicles worldwide for a 9-percent global market share, as revealed in group chairman Chung Mong-koo's speech last month.

Chung's overseas schedule is accordingly busy. The 70-year-old CEO will next week visit the maker's Czech plant in Nosovice, which is currently in test operation. He will also accompany President Lee Myung-bak on his visit to Russia and check the construction site in St. Petersburg.

The entrepreneur will attend the groundbreaking of the Sao Paolo plant in November and have talks with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Share of overseas production is in steep growth. It surpassed domestically produced vehicles in Hyundai's January-July global sales of 1.3 million vehicles this year.

A total of 651,833 vehicles, or 50.1 percent, were manufactured overseas, up 4 percent from a year earlier. The rate has been in constant upturn from 18.8 percent in 2003.

Hyundai's overseas production capacity will reach an annual 2 million vehicles with the completion of plants in Russia and the Czech Republic.

hckim@koreatimes.co.kr