Russia car sales expected to plunge 51% this year

Russia's Industry Ministry expects car sales to halve in 2022 as the country's automobile industry grapples with supply issues, a senior official said.

"We saw a sharp fall (in car sales) in April and May," Tigran Parsadanyan, deputy head of the ministry's automotive and railway engineering department, said on Thursday.

"We expect that some 750,000 cars will be sold on the market by the end of the year."

That figure represents a 51 percent drop in sales year-on-year.

The Association of European Businesses (AEB) said on Monday that sales of new cars in Russia in May fell 84 percent to 24,268 vehicles.

The AEB expects car sales to fall by at least 50 percent this year.