Sales of passenger cars in Russia are set to drop by 25% to 1.1 million units this year, the head of Avtovaz, the country’s largest automaker, said on Wednesday.
Russia’s car market slumped as Western companies halted sales and production soon after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Spurred by the rapid arrival of Chinese carmakers, the market gradually recovered before starting to struggle again this year.
“The situation will be difficult, the market will fall, it is already quite obvious, and the volume of the decline will be about one quarter compared with last year,” Avtovaz CEO Maxim Sokolov said on TV channel Russia 24.
In late 2024, Sokolov had blamed the central bank’s high key interest rate as one of the difficulties facing the auto sector.
On Wednesday, Sokolov said that around 500,000 new cars were ready and waiting to be sold, but finding buyers was difficult.
In January-May, sales of new passenger cars fell 26% to 440,259 units, according to data from analytical agency Autostat, while Avtovaz’s own sales fell 24.2% to 131,316 units.
“This is serious, production cannot move forward with such fluctuations,” Sokolov said.
Avtovaz is taking anti-crisis measures. The company is adjusting its production plan for 2025 and expects its own sales to drop by 20-25% to 367,200 cars, the TASS news agency reported, citing Sokolov.
(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov)
