“Moskvich 6” has reached discounts – Kommersant FM

Dealership centers began selling the new Moskvich below the recommended price, the Autonews portal found out. We are talking about the Moskvich 6 liftback, which appeared in showrooms in October. According to the official website, prices range from 2.6 million rubles. up to almost 3 million rubles. However, in fact, a car in the basic version can be purchased for 2.5 million rubles. In some cases, dealers also offer gifts, for example, a set of winter tires.

Why is this happening? And how do sellers compensate for losses? General Director of the Vector Market Research agency Dmitry Chumakov suggests that this is how the brand is trying to compete with more well-known brands: “The current situation is that competition with Chinese cars is quite high. You can buy models, albeit not so interesting in terms of information technology for the comfort of drivers and passengers, but cheaper. In addition, Moskvich is still a fairly new product for the Russian market.

In order for people to feel some additional motivation and greater benefits when buying such a car, dealers really have to offer some special conditions.

But at the same time, I think they compensate for this lost profit by successfully selling additional equipment and financial products, from which they also receive commissions. An important task for Moskvich in terms of marketing is to work to increase the attractiveness of the brand.”

At the same time, Kommersant FM’s interlocutors also name other reasons – the demand for cars is decreasing, including due to the high key rate, loans have become more expensive, which leads to overstocking of dealerships, and they cannot keep cars on their balance sheets for a long time.

A similar situation was observed in 2019, said Vyacheslav Zhigalov, vice-president of the Russian Automobile Dealers Association. According to him, next year supply will also exceed demand, and this will also lead to a decrease in the quality of services for customers:

“The volume of supply significantly exceeded demand, which led to serious losses from the sale of cars. The profitability of sales of almost all brands without exception was negative. Recipes to combat this were developed back then – this was trade-in, which was supported by the manufacturer, sales of insurance, credit and leasing products. This, of course, led to consumer complaints about the imposition of services.

Unfortunately, we are seeing this story repeat itself. Next year, most likely, it will not go anywhere, since the plans that are now signed by manufacturers are significantly higher than what is expected in the market in terms of demand. I won’t say that this is good for consumers, because although prices are indeed falling, this is offset by a serious drop in the quality of services.”

According to Avtostat, as of mid-December, the stock of unsold Chinese cars at Russian dealers exceeded 170 thousand units. In just ten months, drivers purchased 400 thousand of these cars. At the same time, Vedomosti wrote that Chinese manufacturers hope to sell 1.2 million cars in Russia next year.

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Elena Ivanova