OREANDA-NEWS. February 02, 2015. St. Petersburg plant GM-Auto that worked intermittently the last year will be stopped again for almost two months due to a fall in demand and the collapse of the Russian car market as a whole.

As the press service of the company informed the newspaper "Kommersant", GM decided to stop the conveyor plant in St. Petersburg from March 23rd to May 15th. The idle will be paid to employees by the Russian labor legislation. Last time such large-scale outages at GM were in August and September of the last year, the plant only worked four days a month, and in October - eight days.

In 2014, GM's sales in Russia fell by 26.4% to 257.6 thousand cars, and GM's market share declined by 1.7 percentage points to 7.6%. While sales of Opel last year in Russia decreased by 20%, the sales of Chevrolet fell by 29%, and the best-selling model Cruze – by 25%. GM did not get much benefit from running in the autumn of the state program of scrapping, which has supported, for example, AvtoVAZ, UAZ, Kia and Volkswagen. But GM was able to sell under the program between September and December only 4000 cars, or about 2% of the number of sold cars in the last year with the utilization discount.

In addition, GM has raised the prices due to the weakening of the ruble. According to the President of GC "Favorite Motors", Vladimir Popov (dealer of Chevrolet, Opel, KIA, etc.), the rise in prices since the beginning of 2014 was 35% in average, and for the last two months – it was about 20%. The owner of the St. Petersburg dealer GM "R-Motors", Andrei Ivoylov, believes that the price for cars of concern from December increased by 40-60% depending on the model. According to sources among dealers, price increases associated with "low localization of GM models in Russia," which is why "more expensive imported parts immediately reflected in the price." Mr. Popov adds that another reason for the decline in demand is - "long overdue update" of model range of Chevrolet.

St. Petersburg GM plant produces currently models of Chevrolet Cruze, Opel Astra, Chevrolet Trailblazer, as well as the Cadillac CTS, SRX and ATS. In 2015, it was planned to start the production of the crossover Cadillac Escalade and Chevrolet Tahoe. In May of 2016, according to sources, the company expects to launch the assembly of Opel Mokka, but now the concern management is reviewing plans. 

It is worth noting that due to the ongoing fall of the Russian car market for more than two years, many automakers have stopped their assembly lines. For example, the production was stopped for the whole January at "Avtotor" and Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk worked from December 10th to January 19th; the plant Peugeot, Citroen and Mitsubishi in Kaluga region was not working from December 17th to January 12th.

The CEO of “Auto-Dealer-SPb", Michael Chaplygin, believes that the development strategy of GM plant is not clear. "If the demand for mass models that are produced here fell over a year ago, then the reaction could be followed for a long time ago”, - he says.- As a result, it was decided to produce the models here, which will give a maximum sale of 5-7 thousand units per a year, and it was necessary about 50 thousand. "

As the press service of GM-Auto informed the agency "AUTOSTAT", at the end of 2014 the assembly line of the enterprise, whose design capacity is 98 thousand cars a year, produced 36,708 cars Chevrolet, Opel and Cadillac.