Chinese manufacturers plan to launch online car sales, bypassing dealers and distributors. Negotiations are currently underway to create such a sales channel between a large automaker and a Russian IT company. This was reported by the Chinese Auto Telegram channel, citing a source from the automotive market.
The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers sent a letter to Chinese automakers with an order “given the huge demand and, in fact, the lack of alternatives for the Chinese auto industry in the Russian Federation, to step up the extraction of maximum profit. through online sales, without the margin of resellers and distributors “. Speaking of which Chinese cars of the channel reported with reference to an automotive market source.
Against the backdrop of all the restrictions that the Russian auto market has faced in recent months due to sanctions, the largest Chinese carmakers have come forward and are looking for partners between banks and IT companies that have experience selling online in the car segment. According to the source, at least one of the biggest automotive concerns is in the final stage of negotiations with a Russian IT company. The parties to the agreement are still unknown.
In other words, Chinese automakers are planning to make the main sales channel in the Russian market online. In July 2020, Hyundai launched such a scheme as an experiment. According to Aleksey Kalitsev, chief executive of Hyundai Motor CIS, the company intended to sell up to 50% of the cars through the online platform directly to end customers by 2025.
According to the company’s idea, the dealerships should have abandoned the issue of cars, for which they would have received a fixed commission, which would correspond to the size of the margin from the sale of the car. The representative office predicted that in 2021 at least 150 dealerships (out of 190 in Russia at the time) would issue cars sold directly.
However, already in the winter of 2021, the official Hyundai dealers in St. Petersburg sent a letter to the Russian Automobile Dealers Association (ROAD) with a request to solve the problem with the entry of the Hyundai Motor CIS trading house (the office of Hyundai’s Russian representation) in the online sales market. According to the letter, the dealers were not happy with the role of paid “transmission link”. This position was shared by the Moscow authorized dealers of Hyundai automobiles. The concessionaires’ additional plans were to apply to the Federal Antimonopoly Service. The automaker itself hasn’t begun to assess what was going on, but it seems that Hyundai’s online sales scheme could not be set in motion. Spring 2021 many car owners have noticed thisthat in the online showroom on the Hyundai website the cars became available only on credit and in April the cars disappeared entirely from the site.
7136
views
