Hyundai Motor India names COO, former sales head Tarun Garg, as the first Indian MD and CEO

Hyundai Motor India said on Wednesday that it has appointed chief operating officer Tarun Garg as the MD and CEO of the Indian unit of the South Korean carmaker, effective January 1, 2026. The appointment will make Garg the first Indian to lead Hyundai Motor India.

Garg will take over from current MD and CEO Unsoo Kim, who will return to South Korea to assume a strategic role at Hyundai Motor Company, effective December 31, 2025. It was earlier expected that Garg would take over from Kim at the inauguration of the company’s manufacturing facility in Talegaon, Maharashtra.

This transition is widely believed to be a new practice adopted by Hyundai, where it is elevating non-Koreans to leadership positions where it has a significant presence. The elevation of Jose Munoz as the first non-Korean president of Hyundai in January is believed to be a part of the strategy, after serving as the global COO since 2019.

Garg, a veteran in the Indian automobile industry, spent 25 years working for Maruti Suzuki, India’s largest carmaker. He joined Hyundai in 2019 as the director of sales and marketing and was appointed as the COO in 2023, where he is believed to have been working closely with Munoz. It is worth noting that a fact-finding team was dispatched from South Korea to India earlier this year, amid declining sales.

He will take the helm from Kim—who steered Hyundai in its ₹27,870 crore IPO, the biggest in India so far—at a time when the company has been ceding market share to homegrown rivals Mahindra and Mahindra and Tata Motors.

The SUV market—once a stronghold for Hyundai in India, which includes the Creta, its runaway success model—declined 10.1% year-over-year and 14.8% decline sequentially. While Creta contributes 36%, it has raised concerns that sales volume is skewed towards a single model. Tarun Garg dispelled these concerns by claiming that there is a healthy distribution of sales across all its models. “Venue contributes 17% to our sales, Exter contributes 13%, and Aura contributes 11.2%. I don’t think there is any over-reliance on one model,” he had said.