Changan aims to minimize losses in Russia amid hard year for auto market
MOSCOW. Sept 8 (Interfax) - The Russian distributor of Chinese automaker Changan is striving to achieve sales and financial results in 2025 that are close to last year's figures, but does not rule out a small loss for the year amid the difficult market environment, the executive director of Changan Motors Rus LLC, Alexander Kulagin said in an interview with Interfax.
Sales of Changan automobiles in Russia jumped 1205 to 106,100 vehicles in 2024, Avtostat data showed. The brand's market share grew by 2.3 percentage points to 6.8%.
Changan Motors Rus saw its net profit fall 89% to 808.5 million rubles last year although revenue grew by 90% to 233.5 billion rubles.
However, the Russian car market contracted by 23% to 773,300 vehicles in the first eight months of 2025 after growing by 48.4% to 1.57 million last year, while Changan's sales plunged 37.4% to 44,800 and its market share shrank by 1.3 pp to 5.8%.
"We're trying on a monthly basis to find a balance between losses, profitability and sales volumes in order to offset the final loss for the year. Essentially, our objective is to approach a near-zero dynamic for both number of sold automobiles and financial results in a balanced manner," Kulagin told Interfax.
The "market today is such that we have to pay almost 20% on top of the cost to sell a product," he said. "This is a kind of subsidy that allows the customer to get an adequate rate on a loan - up to 10% - or instalment plan. All this is done not because we want to. These are the conditions on which the customer is prepared to buy a vehicle today," Kulagin said.
He said the "hint of a thaw" has appeared on the Russian automobile market since July with the start of the cycle of interest rate cuts, but the market has not yet felt the direct effect of the cuts to the current level.
"The situation will really start to change when the [Central Bank's key] rate will be in the range of 10%-12%. Then the market will be able to return to a level of 1.3 million-1.4 million sold new automobiles per year. In this sense, we have more positive expectations for next year. Nonetheless, we recently met with bankers, who said that people have withdrawn more than 200 billion rubles from deposits since the start of the cycle of rate cuts. And some of this money will obviously come into our sector," Kulagin said.
The decline of expectations that automobile brands that left Russia will return is also a positive factor for the market, he said.
