Hyundai Puts a 15-Year Veteran in Charge of Its U.S. Dealer Network — Here’s What He Inherits
Mark Kato, with Hyundai Motor America since 2011, now oversees dealer development for Hyundai and Genesis across North America — a network that has just posted its best third quarter and is still mid-renovation.
Hyundai Motor North America has promoted Mark Kato to vice president of dealer network development, handing him responsibility for how Hyundai and Genesis dealers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are added, upgraded, and measured. The move took effect October 12, and Kato reports directly to Randy Parker, the group's president and CEO.
The timing is comfortable. Hyundai just posted its best third quarter on record in the U.S., with 246,896 vehicles sold from July through September. Dealers are the ones who have to keep that pace through the launch of the redesigned Tucson, the brand's volume leader.
Who Kato is
Kato is not a newcomer to the network he now runs. He joined Hyundai Motor America in 2011 and has spent the years since on the retail side of the business: sales satisfaction, market representation, dealer strategy, and, most recently, the executive director job for dealer development. That role already covered dealer agreements, facilities and branding, and performance management for both Hyundai and Genesis, so the promotion formalizes a lot of what he was doing.
Before Hyundai, he spent more than two decades with other automakers on regional dealer operations and network planning, according to the company. All told, that is 34 years in the industry.
Parker, who took over as CEO of Hyundai and Genesis Motor North America on January 1, 2025, after José Muñoz moved up to run Hyundai Motor Company, said dealers already know and trust Kato and that he brings a practical, dealer-first view to the job.
What he inherits
Two long-running projects land on Kato's desk. The first is Hyundai's Global Dealership Space Identity program, the facility standard the brand introduced in 2015 and refreshed in 2019. As of mid-2025, more than 457 U.S. stores had completed the rebuild, and Hyundai was targeting more than 60 percent of the network by the end of that year, so a sizable share of dealers still has work ahead.
The second is Genesis, which has been pushing dealers to move the luxury brand out of Hyundai showrooms and into dedicated buildings. The brand reported 84 standalone Genesis facilities in the U.S. as of February, after opening nine in a single wave, and it sold more than 82,000 vehicles in 2025, its best year yet. That network will be expected to carry the GV90 flagship when it arrives.
Hyundai hasn't said whether Kato's promotion comes with any change in network targets, and the company didn't name a successor for the executive director role he vacates. The practical signal is continuity: the person dealers have been negotiating with for years now has the title to match.
