After the first month of year-on-year growth in two years last November, Russian car sales recorded a positive first quarter in 2017 – a further sign that the market may have turned a corner.
According to the Association of European Businesses (AEB), sales in March grew by 9.4% from a year earlier, to 137,894 units.
This was enough to counter the year-on-year decreases reported in January and February, with 322,464 cars sold in the first three months of 2017, 1% more than in the same period a year earlier.
“This is great news for our market, which had not seen a positive quarter in more than four years,” said Joerg Schreiber, chairman of the AEB Automotive Manufacturers Committee.
“But as the saying goes, one swallow does not make a summer. More solid monthly results will be needed before we can call this a robust trend.”
The best selling car brands in the quarter were Lada (pictured), with 61,447 units and growth of 8%; Kia, which sold 37,310 cars (up 13%); and Hyundai, with sales of 30,304 (up 3%).
Towards the end of last year, the AEB reported that Russia’s car sales during November had shown the first year-on-year gain in almost two years.
Sales grew 0.6% year-on-year in November, after falls of 2.6% in October, 10.9% in September and 18% in August. Overall light vehicle sales in Russia fell 11% in 2016 to 1.42m units.
In February, Daimler confirmed an investment of more than €250m ($263m) to begin manufacturing Mercedes-Benz cars in the country from 2019.
