(Reuters) – New car sales in Russia in April fell 78.5% year on year, contracting for the tenth month in a row, hit by acute shortages and soaring prices caused by disrupted logistics and a volatile rouble.
New car sales of 32,706 cars in April were less than one-quarter of those sold a year earlier, the Association of European Businesses (AEB) said on Wednesday.
Sales of new cars this year are expected to shrink by at least 50%, the AEB said last month, after a 4.3% increase in 2021.
Sales of Lada cars by Russia’s largest automaker AvtoVaz in April were down 78%, AEB data showed.
In the first four months of 2022, Russia’s sales of new cars and light commercial vehicles fell 43% to 293,846 units, AEB said.
The Russian car market had ranked among the most promising globally until 2014, encouraging foreign automakers to build factories there.
Before the latest Western sanctions designed to punish Moscow for what it calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine, Russian car sales stood at 1.67 million last year compared with almost 3 million sold a year in the 2000s.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Louise Heavens and Jason Neely)
