At the drag racing festival, held in Bykovo near Moscow, not only motorsports athletes gathered, but also representatives of large businesses in the automotive industry, who discussed problems of the Russian market in 2024, as well as their solutions.
The discussion was attended by representatives of Russian and foreign brands of auto components, editors of automotive media and heads of analytical agencies.
According to Sergei Tselikov, General Director of the Autostat agency, 1.5 million new cars will be sold in Russia in 2024. «The secondary market will be approximately 5.5-5.6 million, and the vehicle fleet will reach 45 million cars,” said the general director of the Autostat agency. With this forecast of car sales, the total volume of the motor oil market will be 270 million liters.
Such an impressive market capacity, coupled with the departure of the main contenders for it, affected the growth in the supply of lubricants, including as well familiar and unknown brands.
According to experts, many of the manufacturers that have flocked to Russia offer products of very low quality — such oils do not reach the level of international industry standards API, ACEA and ILSAC.
According to statistics, about 20 percent of the market today is made up of products of famous world brands, which are brought to Russia under various parallel import schemes. Unfortunately, most of the starting points are “southern” countries, such as Turkey or Oman, where there are no problems with cold starts and cranking of parts at sub-zero temperatures. Numerous studies have confirmed that such oils differ worse from the products we are used to in terms of physicochemical properties: mainly in terms of pour point and low-temperature pumpability, and therefore are not suitable for use in Russian climatic conditions.
The tire market, according to Ekaterina Guseva, head of the strategic marketing department of Cordiant JSC, follows both the trajectory of the car market and changes in the composition of participants. Today, car owners prefer tires from Russia and China, and the reason for this is simple: there are no others. But buying tires today looks much safer, because making a counterfeit tire from a well-known brand is almost as difficult as making an original one.
The Russian oil market also has a national feature: Svetlana Shakova, brand director of Rolf in Russia, noted that the Russian market, unlike, say, the European or American, stands out for its much greater “premium” nature. Car enthusiasts in our country value synthetic base and high-quality additive packages more than others, and we change oils every 7-10, rather than every 15 thousand kilometers, as abroad.
In many ways, it is this “feature” of the market that forces Russians to continue buying oils from outdated brands, despite all the risks. Instead, experts advise paying attention to products that were produced for the Russian market, because only such a lubricant “takes into account the characteristics of the Russian climate and the operating conditions of transport in it,” says Svetlana Shakova. – Oils based on Rolf recipes are developed in Germany, but adapted to Russian conditions; the company produces them under a license agreement at the UPEC site in the Kaluga region. For example, our flagship Rolf Ultra line contains oils with a freezing point below -60 degrees — this makes it possible to use them even in the Arctic and Far North conditions. High-tech imported base oils, including group 4 from gas feedstock, and additive packages from leading global manufacturers help us achieve such results.”.
Rolf Lubricants GmbH is based in Germany, but since the company is small on a global scale, it is not in the sight of official European regulatory authorities. Therefore, the company has the opportunity to produce oils in Russia according to its own recipes and use original additive packages, while maintaining official relations with the world's leading manufacturers. This ensures that Rolf oils have official approvals and compliance with VW, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar Land Rover and many others.
Despite the complexity of Russia’s foreign trade relations with many countries in Europe and America, some companies operating in the Russian market managed to maintain access to the so-called “original packages” from the big four Lubrizol, Infineum, Chevron Oronite and Afton Chemical. Director of Research and Development at Rolf Lubricants Artem Chaltsev confirmed this, adding that the ability to buy top additives is only one of the difficulties for Russian companies. «Of course, there are Russian companies with a high level of product quality. Some of them make their own additive packages, similar to those supplied from abroad, while others bring packages for parallel import. The only thing that is currently inaccessible to Russian companies is obtaining official approvals from automakers. We have these approvals, so if you buy our lubricant with the inscription “Mercedes approved” on the can, then we have an official letter with an approval number from Mercedes, and this oil is guaranteed to suit your car. /i>
Based on the results of the round table, the following conclusions can be drawn: the Russian market has stabilized and fully adapted to the challenges of the past years. Parallel imports were an effective measure to overcome shortages, but now they are no longer necessary, mainly due to the difficulty of controlling the quality of incoming products. Russian manufacturers and market participants who remain in the country have improved the level of production technology and consumer properties of goods, and now domestic car enthusiasts are increasingly choosing among quality products rather than “two evils.”
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