Russia has recorded October sales of new passenger cars and LCVs rising 17.3%, the eighth consecutive monthly increase after years of sharply falling numbers.
The country had posted four years of successive heavy falls in car sales as a combination of a tumbling oil price, a drop in the rouble value and access to credit difficulties created a depressed market, but this year has seen repeated improvement.
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Russia is uniquely susceptible to energy price fluctuations and the recent appreciation in the cost of a barrel of oil to around US$60 may be partly responsible for increased consumer confidence, coupled with a healthy incentive programme from The Kremlin.
Among the top ten bestselling models so far, all models are locally produced, with October seeing an extra 21,892 vehicles sold amounting to a total of 148,597 units, according to the AEB Automobile Manufacturers Committee (AEB AMC).
From January to October this year, 1,277,938 cars were sold.
“The recovery of the Russian car market continues with October sales exceeding last year’s result by a robust 17%,” said AEB AMC chairman, Joerg Schreiber.
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By GlobalData“This is now the eighth consecutive month of year-on-year improvement, the longest period of uninterrupted growth the market of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles has experienced since 2012.
“Of course the size of today’s market is still a far cry from the record sales achieved in that year.
“But it is encouraging to see that, at the current pace of recovery, total sales in 2017 have a good chance to restore the market to the level it had in 2015.”
