State pollster VTsIOM said the number of consumers planning to buy a car within a year has doubled since February, rising to 6 percent from 3 percent, while 13 percent expect to make a purchase within two to three years, up from 8 percent half a year ago.
Carmakers attributed the slight gain to state and private efforts to make loans more affordable. The state has been subsidizing interest rates on auto loans since May to boost demand for new cars made in Russia, and import tariffs imposed this year have also boosted demand for domestic vehicles.
The poll found that Russian-made cars have become more attractive since February, with 22 percent of respondents planning to buy a domestically made auto, up from 12 percent. The number planning to get a new foreign car grew just 4 percent since February, and fewer people plan to purchase a used foreign car, down from 25 percent to 23 percent.
Of those who know how they’ll pay for a new car, 42 percent plan to get a bank loan, up from 36 percent.
And while the results show a slight improvement since the start of the year, the market is still in the doldrums. Seven-month car sales are down 50 percent from last year for a decrease of nearly 900,000 cars, according to the Association of European Businesses.
AvtoVAZ’s Lada brand holds the top four spots on the country’s best-seller list.
As of Aug. 20, the state has provided 26,845 subsidized loans, approving just over half of the requests it received, according to Industry and Trade Ministry data. The program is “90 percent AvtoVAZ-oriented,” Alexei Rakhmanov, the ministry’s auto department head, said last week in an interview on the ministry’s web site.
Both state and private programs have brought a “slight increase of activity on the market and a slight increase of the share of cars bought with car loans,” said VTB-24 vice president Alexei Tokarev, who oversees the bank’s auto loans. The bank gave 23,000 car loans in the first six months of 2009, a figure that could grow by 40 percent in the second half if the trend stays positive, he said.
U.S. automaker Ford, whose Russian-built Focus is the country’s No. 5 best-selling car, is also seeing a “positive trend in retail finance programs’ penetration,” said spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko. Ford’s retail finance program lending has doubled since the start of the year and is now part of 21 percent of new sales.
Ford saw sales rise 17 percent in July, month on month, while the Focus was up 27 percent because it was eligible for the state subsidies and Ford’s own in-house program, which started in June, she said.
Nonetheless, the auto loans market is way down this year, with some banks lending 90 percent less in the first half, according to industry agency Avtostat. The car loan market’s total size fell to $5 billion, from $20 billion in the first half of 2008, and the share of cars purchased with bank loans fell to 25 percent, from 50 percent.
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