The auto industry will miss state support – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) of 02.10.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade seized 3 billion rubles. from the grant program for the localization of auto components for the needs of the industry of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. The remaining funds will be sufficient to finance no more than two projects. According to Kommersant’s sources, the industry is in dire need of state support, the funds for which have already been collected from auto concerns through scrap collection. The Industrial Development Fund noted that it has the ability to issue loans for components from available funds.

The program of the Industrial Development Fund (IDF) “Autocomponents” was reduced by 3 billion rubles, to about 3 billion rubles, and the funds were reallocated to the “needs of new territories,” three interlocutors told Kommersant. According to the draft budget, 6.9 billion rubles were allocated for its financing in 2023, but now the budget has been adjusted by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Ministry of Industry and Trade did not comment.

This is a program that provides loans at 1% per annum for the creation of serial production of components and assemblies for wheeled vehicles and special equipment, as well as an increase in the production of auto components. The size of loans varies from 100 million to 5 billion rubles, according to the parameters of the program. In 2022, as the Ministry of Industry and Trade reported, 14 loans were issued under the Autocomponents program for a total of RUB 45.2 billion. The borrowers under this program were AvtoVAZ, KamAZ, the Ural automobile plant and other companies.

Kommersant’s source notes that now the program has announced mainly projects from auto concerns, funding requests for each of them start from 1.5 billion rubles. According to Kommersant, there are several applications with funding of 3-4 billion rubles.

Kommersant’s interlocutors do not know what exactly the funds will be redistributed for. But on February 9, Alexei Bezprozvannykh, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, announced that industrial enterprises in the LPR would receive 1 billion rubles. for development. According to him, the creation of a regional industrial development program for such entities is a priority task facing the Ministry of Industry and Trade in 2023.

The situation with state support in the automotive industry as a whole is close to critical, Kommersant’s sources say. Among other things, they talk about the exhaustion of funds for the preferential car loan program for cars with internal combustion engines – Autonews wrote about this on February 9. Difficulties with financing programs in the industry arose even during the formation of the federal budget, since traditionally they were used for disposal fees from insufficiently localized foreign industries in the Russian Federation, which are now mostly idle (see Kommersant dated September 15, 2022).

Usually, the car industry’s request for additional funding was also resolved at the expense of the scrap collection – it was indexed, and the “surplus” of funds collected from local factories was directed to subsidies. In January, the head of AvtoVAZ, Maxim Sokolov, proposed increasing the salvage fee (see Kommersant on January 11). But in the past two years, the authorities have refused to do this because of the risks of rising car prices and the associated social tensions. Kommersant’s source says that it would be possible to increase import duties, but these funds “will definitely not be returned from the budget,” since it is planned to be in deficit.

However, one of Kommersant’s sources says that finding funding for at least the auto components program should not be a problem, given that the IDF has its own funds. In addition, he notes, the program funds would not have been enough in any case – in 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Trade estimated the need for financing the localization of components at 100 billion rubles.

The FRP Kommersant explained that even without additional capitalization, the fund “has 75 billion rubles at its disposal. for all financing programs, some of which can be directed, among other things, to projects for the production of auto components.

Automotive expert Vladimir Bespalov notes that it is impossible to build your own auto industry without creating a component base. At the same time, it will be difficult to implement this only at the expense of the automakers’ own funds if the task is to create added value in the country.

Olga Nikitina