Up to 33% of total car dealerships in Russia belong to Chinese brands, and the market share of Chinese brands is close to that of Russia.

A report from the Russian customs agency shows that new car sales fell by 59% in 2022, reaching 623,000 vehicles. Of these, 30% are Russian brands. Korean cars ranked second with 19.5% of sales, and the third place belonged to Chinese brands, with 19.2%. Firms from Europe accounted for 18.5%.

Over the past year, the monthly market share of Russian and Chinese brands has also increased significantly. According to the chart above, the market share of domestic brands has gone from 20% to 41% in one year (January 2022-January 2023), while Chinese brands from 10% to 38%. This increase also shows a decline in brands coming from other places.

Specifically, the market share of Korean brands decreased from 24% to 9%, European brands decreased from 27% to 6%, and Japanese brands from 18% to 6%.

As of mid-January, there were 3,164 car dealerships in Russia, 56 fewer than a year ago. This data is collected by the analytics agency Autostat, from the periodic monitoring of the dealer network of car manufacturers officially operating in the Russian market. Further analysis of the resulting data allows experts to conclude that the system is changing not only in quantity.

The results are remarkable when dividing agents by brand origin. Accordingly, the number of agents belonging to Chinese brands increased. Currently, these agents account for 33% of the total number of dealers in Russia. Just a year ago, this figure was only about 22.4%.

Russian domestic brands also improved, with the share increasing from 13% to 14.3%. A slight increase also occurred for brands from Korea (12.4% to 12.5%) despite the difficult market context.

The proportion of dealers from European brands decreased from 27.5% to 22.8%. The situation is similar for agents from Japan (from 20.6% to 16.4%) and the US (from 4.1% to 0.7%).

The main causes of the change in the Russian market are sanctions and a number of other factors, such as inflation, lack of vehicles, as well as the withdrawal of European, Japanese and Korean brands from Russia, or logistics problems.

But also in the past year, many Chinese car brands have set foot in Russia, such as Tank from Great Wall, Voyah from Dongfeng, Skywell, Omoda and Kaiyi from Chery, and Hongqi from FAW. In addition, Russian automakers also began to produce cars licensed from China. For example, the Moskvich 3 model is a clone of JAC JS4, or the Evolute i-Joy is actually Seres SF3.

Source: vnexpress.net