Foreign car manufacturers are worried about the current state of the Russian market
Za Rulyom – Ford finance director Bob Shanks, interviewed by the German financial paper Handelsblatt, has stated that the problems arising from the devaluation of the rouble and the weakness of the economy will reflect on the share of the company in the Russian automobile market and 2015 doesn’t look promising from their point of view. According to Shanks, the Japanese and Korean competitors of Ford have managed to pull down prices by manipulating the exchange rate advantage, putting the company in a predicament. Shanks, however, states that Ford will go to all lengths in its combat against the crisis, apart from leaving Russia.
Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has also stated during his interview with Bloomberg that the automobile sales will continue to fall in Russia this year: “The market will shrink by a third during the next couple of years. The situation is already bad.”
The officials from the London based advisory firm Evercore ISI, interviewed by Bloomberg, are of the opinion that the car manufacturers have no option but to reduce their losses to minimum and wait until the crisis is over.
The experts from the consultancy firm IHS Automotive estimate this year’s sales figure in Russian market as 1.8 million vehicles (-2.7%). As predicted by the company, the prices of imported automobiles will increase by 20% and the domestically manufactured vehicles by 10%, in the meantime. The experts state that the neighbouring countries will suffer from a potential crisis in Russian economy and that will cancel out the positive effect resulting from falling petrol prices: “The biggest uncertainty for European car manufacturers, if not for the rest of the world, will be the shrinkage volume in the Russian market in 2015-2016.”
