According to a recent report by Autostat Analytic Agency, new car sales of Chinese brands now account for more than 38% of new car sales in Russia. This is an increase from one year ago when, from January to February 2022, this proportion was less than 10%.
The Customs Bureau of the Russian Federation report shows that new car sales in Russia dropped 59% yearly in 2022 to 623,000 cars, of which nearly 30% are Russian brands. Second, Korean vehicles accounted for 19.5% of sales. Chinese manufacturers ranked in the top three steadily, accounting for 19.2%; European manufacturers accounted for 18.5%.
Sergey Tselikov, head of Autostat, said: “Russian and Chinese brands are increasing their share in the Russian market. The market share of Russian brands increased from 20% to 41% in a year, while Chinese brands increased from 10% to 38%. The increased share of these two countries’ automotive brands reflects the decline in the market share of other countries’ brands. But the share of Korean brands dropped from 24% to 9%, European brands from 27% to 6%, and Japanese brands from 18% to 6%.”
Due to international sanctions and other factors, such as inflation; vehicle shortages; European, Japanese, and Korean car brands’ withdrawal from the market; logistics problems, etc. Russia sold about 680,000 cars domestically. In 2021, this figure was 1.17 million, a 41% decrease year-on-year. Given that the overall market has declined by nearly half, Russian and Chinese brands have increased substantially, but sales have remained flat.
As of mid-January 2023, there were 3,164 car dealers in Russia. Among them, European brand dealers’ proportion decreased from 27.5% (January 2022) to 22.8% (January 2023). The share of Japanese brand dealers’ proportion decreased from 20.6% to 16.4%, and that of American brand dealers’ proportion decreased from 4.1% to 0.7%.
However, in early 2022, the proportion of Chinese brand dealers among all car dealers in Russia was 33.3%. In 2022, that percentage was 22.4%. In addition to Chinese brands, the share of local Russian brands has also been listed, with the proportion of dealers rising from 13% to 14.3%. The number of Korean brand dealers was flat, with a share of 12.4% in 2022 and 12.5% in 2023.
In the past year, many Chinese automotive brands have entered the Russian market, such as Tank from Great Wall, Voyah from Dongfeng, Skywell, Omoda and Kaiyi from Chery, and Hongqi from FAW. Moreover, some Russian car companies have started to manufacture licensed clones of Chinese vehicles. For example, the Moskvich 3, which is a copycat of the JAC JS4 (Sehol X4 in China); or the Evolute i-Joy, which is a copycat of the Seres SF3.
The ” other factors ” being Russias’ invasion of the Ukraine, which lead to the sanctions and to the withdrawal of most international brands from the Russian market.
Saying that Russia started a war with the Ukraine isn’t taking sides, you know. They did, you know it, I know it, everybody knows it. I’m not expecting journalistic impartiality from a blog, but your integrity really took a blow with this one.
I oppose war, especially aggressive war. But I wrote car news and didn’t want to spend too many words discussing politics.