Kia Stinger reserved for private buyers

Damien Meredith, COO of Kia Australia, is hoping sales of the rear-drive Stinger large car will lift from the current level of 168 units a month to around 200 during 2019.

It's not a huge number, but the Stinger is a hero car for the brand and Meredith doesn't want to jeopardise its status within the range by selling el cheapo versions in saturation-level numbers to large fleets.

"Now we haven't got a fleet program for Stinger – and we'll probably continue along that line, of focusing on the retail aspect of Stinger for a lot of reasons," Meredith told journalists during the launch of the Kia Cerato GT and Picanto GT last week.

"One, [that] protects its residual value by not having a fleet component to it and, secondly, we believe that we'll continue to grow that. Not as quickly as we'd like; the [large car] market's shrinking... but last year we had it to 168 [sales] per month. I would love that to be over 200, but we're not going to do anything silly with the car. We're going to continue to promote it, and stick to a private retail car."

Something 'silly' would be slashing prices to sell it by the container vessel load to fleets that previously supported locally-manufactured large cars like the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon. But selling Stinger to police fleets apparently isn't silly.

"I'm not quite sure police cars fall into that common fleet area, to be quite honest," Meredith replied to a question from the floor. There seems to be more cachet for a vehicle operated in a highway patrol capacity by the boys in blue. In fact, the interest in Stinger from local forces has been leveraged by Kia to sell the high-performance models elsewhere.

Meredith, harking back to an earlier discussion about the Kia brand and marketing position said: "I don't think anyone... would have thought that any police department in Australia would be driving around in a Kia 10 years ago.

"That's not the case now."

Although the Stinger's total sales of 1957 last year were a small component of Kia's passenger-car sales in 2018, the large car was second only to Holden's Commodore in its segment.

Overall, Kia is now in seventh position among Australia's most popular brands. That result has been at the expense of Holden, still sixth, but just 2000 sales in front of the Korean brand at the end of 2018. The company now 'owns' 5.1 per cent of the market.

"Facts are, we are a growing brand, and we've been able to continue that growth over a period of time now. We also believe that growth will continue; it's tougher, obviously, as volume gets higher, but we still believe there's growth in the brand in Australia."

Kia's sales trajectory has been meteoric, with the brand outside the top 10 just four years ago.

"In 2014 we were in 11th position; last year – 2018 – we were at seven.

"We don't believe that growth will be as vibrant as that during 2019, but we still believe there will be growth in the brand.

Despite the slowing sales in 2018, Kia still notched up a significant milestone near the end of the year – the brand's 500,000th sale in Australia. It has taken over 20 years for the brand to reach that mark.

"That did take us a fair amount of time to get there," Meredith admitted.

"We don't expect to take that long to get to the next 500,000."