Dmitry Medvedev: “The auto industry has not been left to deal with the declining market on its own: we’ve introduced a number of measures and two programmes to stimulate demand. Under one of them, the regions receive subsidies to purchase buses and equipment that run on natural gas for housing and amenities services. The second programme is to renew the vehicle fleet.”
Dmitry Medvedev’s opening remarks:
A meeting on measures to support the Russian automotive market
Good afternoon, again, everyone. We’ve been planning a meeting on the Russian automotive market for a while now. Today, we will discuss this issue.
This market has always been and remains one of our core engineering industries. It currently consists of about 400 enterprises which manufacture all categories of vehicles, including cars, commercial trucks, buses, trailers, special-purpose and military vehicles, and automotive parts. These enterprises include plants that were built in Russia by the world's major automotive companies.
Most of the auto companies engage in industrial assembly. Since 2011, there has been a mandatory increase in localisation for this kind of assembly, which has had good results. Imports of new and pre-owned cars are declining, whereas the number of cars assembled in Russia is on the rise, which is a positive development.
Nevertheless, the overall situation on the market is unstable, and the trend is down. The decline in production and sales affects almost all segments. The situation is perhaps slightly better for the production of passenger cars, which, even with the forecasted decline, may exceed the planned figures for the year. The production of commercial vehicles, such as lorries, light commercial vehicles and buses, presents the most problems.
But the auto industry has not been left to deal with the declining market on its own: we’ve introduced a number of measures and two programmes to stimulate demand. Under one of them, the regions receive subsidies to purchase buses and equipment that run on natural gas for housing and amenities services. This year, the federal budget allocated about 4 billion roubles for these purposes, which will allow the regions to purchase 2,500 units of equipment.
The second programme to renew the vehicle fleet is run by automakers and offers discounts on new cars for old ones that are traded in or simply scrapped.
Here’s what we have
today. Let's discuss the results of this work and talk about further steps that
are needed to stimulate the market. It is clear that these measures cannot be
outside the context of the overall budgetary situation, but I would like us to
focus and discuss them in a constructive manner.
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