Russian Car Market Shrinks 40% in March

Russia’s car market shrank by more than 40 percent in March as carmakers struggled with the weaker currency, low consumer confidence and economic crisis in the country, according to the latest data.

Sales of new passenger cars and light commercial vehicles in Russia dropped by 42.5 percent in March 2015 from a year earlier, amounting to 139,850 fewer cars being sold, figures released by the Association for European Businesses (AEB), a Russia-based business lobby group, showed Wednesday.

Commenting on the dire car market figures, Joerg Schreiber, chairman of the AEB Automobile Manufacturers Committee said they reflected Russia’s difficult economic backdrop.

“Total market performance in March is bad, of course, but not much worse than expected,” he said in a statement accompanying the data.

“What we are seeing now in the sales statistics is the long-predicted ‘hole’ in consumer demand, caused by the pull-ahead of car purchases at the end of last year, and compounded by heavy price inflation in the current year.”

Sounding a confident note, Schreiber added that “sooner or later, the situation will stabilize, but we are not at this point yet.”

via CNBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza