Addressing a news conference here on Tuesday, the company president AP Gandhi ruled out any reduction in prices and said it was other companies which were adjusting prices of their products with Santro.

He said Santro was technologically far advanced which met various requirements such as fuel consumption and pollution set for year 2000.

"As far as Telco's Indica is concerned, as of now it is non-existent and one has to wait to see how it performs," he said, adding "after all, people will buy a good car, notwithstanding claims of competitors."

Hyundai Motor signed a memoranda of understanding (MoU) with Kotak Mahindra Primus Ltd and HDFC Bank Ltd for launching two new private label auto finance programmes.

These programmes would carry the Hyundai brand identity and will be offered to the Hyundai Santro customers during its second phase of customer order-taking that began nation-wide from Tuesday.

The company managing director YS Kim, who was present at the conference, signed the MoUs on behalf of Hyundai, while Dipak Gupta, chief executive officer of Kotak Mahindra and Aditya Puri, managing director of HDFC Bank, signed the respective MoUs.

Kim said the company was offering the customer a wider choice of finance options for buying the Santro.

He also announced the delivery figures for the Santro for 1998, according to which the company delivered 8447 cars by December 31, 1998.

The company had collected total orders for 15,470 cars out of which 3621 were cancelled owing to various reasons including launch of Indica and other models, and pending deliveries accounted to 3402 cars.

Kim said the deliveries for the second round of orders would commence in February.

As in the first round of order-taking in October 1998, Hyundai Motor India will accept customer orders in its second phase against payment at existing prices of all the three variants.

Hyundai Motor India is a wholly owned subsidiary of $8.24 billion South Korean giant Hyundai Motor Company that was set up in 1967 as a part of the Hyundai business group and has presence in 168 countreis.