One of the younger and less-heralded global automakers has emerged as a stand-out performer in a year of unprecedented turbulence for the industry.

South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co. is the only traditional mass car manufacturer with a positive stock market return for the year-to-date. The company's bull run peaked on Aug. 9 when it unveiled Ioniq, a sub-brand dedicated to electric vehicles, sending shares up 15.6% on the day.

Hyundai was one of the few carmakers to post an operating profit in the calamitous second quarter. The warm reception from investors reflects not only this robust recent performance but also the company's bold goal to account for one in 10 EVs sold globally in 2025 and its growing share of higher-margin sales in the U.S. thanks to its premium Genesis brand.

"Hyundai does seem very ambitious. I think the Ioniq brand announcement just kind of solidifies a lot of what Hyundai has been planning to do," said David Leggett, automotive editor at consultancy GlobalData in an interview.

The Ioniq range will debut in early 2021 with the "5," a midsize crossover. The "6," a sedan with slippery, wind-cheating looks, will go on sale in 2022 and the "7," a chunky SUV, is scheduled for early 2024. The company has said it will seek to offer most new models with an EV variant in developed countries by 2030, but the rollout will be slower in emerging markets where charging infrastructure is less prevalent.

Hyundai, which also holds a 34.3% stake in Kia Motors Corp., aims to become the No. 3 global producer of eco-friendly vehicles by 2025 with a target of 560,000 battery-electric car sales. Its now-familiar approach of basing an electrified range on a single modular platform, the "E-GMP," looks logical as development costs could be shared with Kia.

Hyundai's electric offensive is similar in many ways to Volkswagen AG, the most aggressive EV convert. Like the German juggernaut, Hyundai is using a separate brand to distinguish its electric products, has unveiled an entire range in one go, named each model by a single digit and based them all on the same technological platform.

"Bringing the product action together under one new brand is probably quite a smart idea as VW has done with the ID in terms of getting it front of mind for potential buyers," Leggett said.

Having some of the world's biggest manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries on its doorstep in South Korea, including LG Chem Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and SK Innovation Co. Ltd., is no bad thing either. Hyundai has deals with all three companies for the supply of batteries and in June was reported to be considering a joint venture with LG Chem for cell production in Indonesia, according to press reports. And should hydrogen cars eventually defy the naysayers, Hyundai is covered there too with its Nexo SUV and billions invested to produce fuel cells.

Hyundai began manufacturing cars in the 1970s with the Pony hatchback and later, the larger Stellar sedan, that were based on end-of-line Mitsubishi and Ford designs. But since then it has steadily clambered up the ranks in terms of quality, product diversity and, critically, sales.

Hyundai and Kia hold a combined 8% share of the global passenger vehicle market and have mostly graduated from the budget segment where they began, giving Hyundai the confidence to launch in 2015 the luxury Genesis brand, emulating a strategy pioneered by Toyota when it launched Lexus.

"Hyundai is a mass-production player, affordable, good value for money, but they now have Genesis," said Moody's analyst Wan Hee Yoo in an interview. "It wasn't doing that well, to be honest, when it was launched in 2015. But this year, we are starting to see a quite decent spike in sales and that is one of the reasons why they have been holding up relatively well during the pandemic period because they have been selling cars with better margins."

Gaining ground in the U.S. has been particularly important as its lower-end products have lost share in the world's biggest car market, China, as domestic brands have improved their offerings in that bracket, Yoo said.

The company's expanded and refreshed SUV range and the higher margins they generate have helped prop up revenue in periods when unit sales have dipped. Hyundai generated 41% of its revenue from SUVs in 2019, up from 36% in 2018, a trend that should lead to mid-single-digit revenue growth in 2020, CFRA analyst Aaron Ho wrote in an Aug. 15 note

"We expect [Hyundai's] global sales volume to continue outpacing the industry in 2020-2021, driven by improved model design and wider offerings," said Ho.

Hyundai's recent announcement of a target for a 7% profit margin in 2022 and 8% by 2025 showed that the company still believes it has "room to improve the margin," Yoo said, at a time when many of its peers are heading in the opposite direction.

Hyundai is not immune to the myriad challenges facing all carmakers in 2020. The company's profit margin thinned from 9% in 2015 to 5.9% in 2019 when a slowing Chinese market had a negative impact across the sector. An Aug. 11 report from S&P Global Ratings flagged lower profitability compared with rivals as a risk, the positive second quarter aside, as well as the scale of investment required for new products and technologies.

"Regulation is pushing auto companies to move quicker than maybe they would like to so they will have to spend a lot of money on that. They have to because the EVs are obviously more expensive to produce. They have to sacrifice their margins to some extent," Yoo said. "Overall, I think, compared to maybe a few years back, it's going to be quite difficult for a lot of the OEMs to reach their peak margins again."

Executing the ambitious Ioniq strategy will be neither easy nor cheap. Hyundai has allocated 61.1 trillion won, or about $51.49 billion, through 2025 to R&D, including "future technologies." By comparison, Volkswagen has said it will spend €60 billion on future technologies, including electrification, through 2024.

"Electrified vehicle technology is expensive and [carmakers'] financial positions aren't great because of the pandemic ... but I think a lot of them feel that they have no alternative really but to press on with electrified vehicle investments," said GlobalData's Leggett. "It could be that when they look at the costs and the technological investment, strategies and priorities, maybe some things change. So electrified perhaps gets accelerated and perhaps some things get put on the back burner."

New electric car announcements are now coming thick and fast, but Hyundai's is unlikely to go unnoticed. It marked the launch of Ioniq by lighting up the London Eye observation wheel in a "Q" shape. Its next move? "Ioniq: I'm on it," a song in partnership with global chart-topping K-pop band BTS that will be released Aug. 31.