A Quarter Down in a Year: Minpromtorg Puts Russia's 2025 New-Vehicle Market at 1.3–1.4 Million Units After a 24.6% Nine-Month Slide
The market for new vehicles in Russia is closing 2025 in a deep contraction: on October 14, 2025 the Ministry of Industry and Trade (Minpromtorg) put expected full-year sales of new vehicles at 1.3–1.4 million units, roughly a quarter below the 2024 result, after just over one million vehicles of all types had been sold in January–September 2025, down 24.6% year on year, Interfax reported. Minister Anton Alikhanov added that sales in the fourth quarter of 2025 are expected at about 350 thousand units. Set against the nine-month total, that quarterly figure defines both the scale of the year-end slide and the width of the annual forecast band, and it is the natural starting point for reading what the ministry's October forecast — and its December 1, 2025 update — actually say about the state of the Russian car market.
Nine months: just over a million units and a 24.6% decline
The foundation of the October forecast is the nine-month tally. Between January and September 2025, just over one million new vehicles of all types were sold in the country, which is 24.6% below the same period of 2024. A decline of this order is not a statistical wobble: it means that roughly one in four purchases made in the first nine months of 2024 simply did not happen a year later. For a market that sells cars, commercial vehicles and buses as a single counted pool, the figure describes demand weakness across the board rather than a problem confined to one segment.
The ministry's own framing of the year makes the same point from the other end. The full-year expectation of 1.3–1.4 million units is described as approximately a quarter below 2024, which is consistent with the nine-month decline of 24.6%: if the first three quarters fell by about a quarter and the fourth quarter is expected to fall by even more, the annual result cannot escape a double-digit contraction. The forecast band is therefore not an optimistic range around a stable market; it is a range around a shrinking one.
- January–September 2025: just over one million new vehicles of all types sold, down 24.6% year on year;
- fourth quarter of 2025: expected sales of about 350 thousand units;
- full year 2025: expected market of 1.3–1.4 million units, roughly a quarter below 2024;
- reference point: the 2025 result may still come in above the 2023 level of about 1.3 million units.
Two features of this set deserve attention before any interpretation. First, the nine-month figure counts vehicles of all types, not passenger cars alone, so it is the broadest available measure of the market. Second, the ministry pairs the annual band with an explicit comparison to 2023, signalling that the relevant question for the year is not only how far the market falls from 2024 but also where it lands relative to the earlier post-reset level of about 1.3 million units.
There is also a calendar dimension to the nine-month figure. January–September 2025 covers three full quarters of selling, including the spring and summer months that normally carry a seasonal lift in registrations; the 24.6% decline therefore cannot be explained away by an unlucky distribution of selling days or by a single weak month. The ministry's quarterly ladder, discussed below, confirms that the weakness was present in the third quarter of 2025 as well, at 406.7 thousand units, and that it is expected to deepen rather than fade in the fourth quarter of the year.
The quarterly ladder: 490.7, 406.7 and 350 thousand
The clearest way to see the trajectory of 2025 is to line up the quarters the ministry itself cites. The fourth quarter of 2024 produced 490.7 thousand units — a strong close to the previous year. The third quarter of 2025 produced 406.7 thousand units. The fourth quarter of 2025 is expected to produce about 350 thousand units. Three rungs, each lower than the last, and the distance between them is the story of the year.
Measured against the fourth quarter of 2024, the expected fourth quarter of 2025 is a decline of 28.7% year on year. Measured against the third quarter of 2025, it is a further decline of 13.9% quarter on quarter. The second comparison is the more telling of the two. A market that is stabilising typically shows a shrinking year-on-year gap as the weak base months of the previous year enter the comparison; a market that is still losing momentum shows a falling quarter-on-quarter line as well. The ministry's own numbers show both gaps widening into the final quarter of 2025.
Checking the arithmetic of the forecast
The three quarterly figures and the annual band are mutually consistent, and tracing that consistency is a useful discipline before drawing conclusions. The following steps use only the ministry's published numbers:
- the expected fourth-quarter decline of 28.7% applied to the 490.7 thousand units of the fourth quarter of 2024 gives about 350 thousand units, exactly the quarterly expectation the ministry states;
- the expected quarter-on-quarter decline of 13.9% applied to the 406.7 thousand units of the third quarter of 2025 likewise gives about 350 thousand units, so the two decline rates describe the same quarterly level from two directions;
- adding the expected 350 thousand units of the fourth quarter to the just-over-one-million units of January–September places the full year at roughly 1.35 million units, the midpoint of the stated 1.3–1.4 million band.
In other words, the annual band is not an independent guess laid over the quarterly data; it is what the quarterly data produce when the expected fourth quarter is added to the realised nine months. The width of the band — one hundred thousand units — is best read as the ministry's allowance for uncertainty in the final quarter's execution rather than as doubt about the direction of the market.
2023 as the reference year: about 1.3 million
The ministry's October statement carries a comparison that is easy to miss: the expected 2025 result, while roughly a quarter below 2024, may still come in above the result of 2023, which the ministry puts at about 1.3 million units. This is the source's own framing of where the current year stands in the market's recent history, and it reframes the decline. A year that falls a quarter from 2024 yet still matches or exceeds 2023 is a year that erases one recovery step rather than the whole recovery path.
Read against the forecast band, the comparison is finely balanced. The lower bound of the band, 1.3 million units, is essentially the 2023 level itself; the upper bound, 1.4 million units, would clear it by about one hundred thousand units. Whether 2025 finishes above or merely level with 2023 therefore depends on which end of the band the fourth quarter delivers — and the fourth quarter, as the quarterly ladder shows, is the weakest rung of the year. The ministry's wording, which says the result may be above 2023 rather than that it will be, matches that balance precisely.
The comparison also sets the scale of what has been lost and what has been kept. Losing about a quarter of the 2024 volume returns the market to the neighbourhood of its 2023 size; it does not return it to the much lower levels of the reset period that preceded the recovery. For readers tracking the cycle, the 2023 reference is the ministry's way of saying that 2025 is a correction within a recovered market, not a new collapse.
Support measures: preferential loans and leasing
The second pillar of the October picture is policy. The ministry reports that preferential car loan and leasing programmes delivered about 115 thousand domestically produced vehicles in the first eight months of 2025. In a nine-month market of just over one million units of all types, that volume is a meaningful floor: a simple division of the ministry's own figures puts the programme-supported volume at roughly a tenth of the counted market, and the share is higher still if the comparison is made against passenger cars alone or against the domestic-production segment that the programmes target.
The design of the support matters as much as its size. Preferential lending and leasing do not raise demand in the abstract; they lower the effective price of a specific basket of vehicles — those produced domestically — for buyers who finance rather than pay cash. In a year when the overall market is down by about a quarter, a programme that moves about 115 thousand units in eight months is best understood as the reason the domestic segment's decline is not proportionally deeper, and as the channel through which the state steers the shrinking demand toward locally built vehicles.
The eight-month window of the programme figure is itself informative. Reported for January–August 2025, the 115 thousand units precede the nine-month market tally by one month, which means the programme's monthly pace — roughly 14 thousand units by simple division — held across all eight months the ministry counts, while the market around it was shrinking by about a quarter year on year. A support channel that keeps delivering at a steady monthly pace in a market falling by a quarter is a channel doing real work on the demand side, even if its aggregate volume cannot close the annual gap.
What the programme can and cannot offset
Two limits follow directly from the numbers. First, the programme's volume is counted in domestically produced vehicles, so it does not compensate the market as a whole: imports and the segments outside the programme's basket continue to contract at the full pace of the demand shock. Second, the programme operates through credit, and credit-supported demand is sensitive to the terms on offer; the eight-month figure of about 115 thousand units describes what the current terms achieved, not a permanent addition to the market's underlying demand. The ministry's October forecast, which places the year at 1.3–1.4 million units despite the programme, is itself the clearest statement of that limit: support softens the decline, it does not reverse it.
The December 1 update: up to 1.5 million units
A month and a half after the October forecast, the ministry's head offered a wider frame. On December 1, 2025 Anton Alikhanov said he allows for the 2025 market to reach up to 1.5 million units, of which 1.25–1.3 million would be the passenger car segment, and noted that almost 1.2 million units had been sold in January–October 2025, Interfax reported. The December statement does not replace the October band; it adds an upper ceiling and, more importantly, a ten-month actual against which both the band and the ceiling can be tested.
The ten-month figure of almost 1.2 million units is the single most useful new number in the December briefing. Combined with the October expectation of about 350 thousand units for the fourth quarter, it brackets the full year from above: the fourth quarter includes October, so the two remaining months of the year can add only what is left of the quarterly expectation after October's own sales are subtracted. The full-year result therefore lands below the sum of 1.2 million and 350 thousand, and the distance below that sum is exactly October's volume.
The December briefing also quietly resolves a question the October statement left open: the composition of the counted market. By separating a passenger-car range of 1.25–1.3 million units inside a total allowance of up to 1.5 million, the ministry indicates that passenger cars are expected to remain the overwhelming majority of all new-vehicle sales, with commercial vehicles and buses filling the remainder. For readers watching the domestic production segment, that split matters because the preferential loan and leasing programmes operate precisely on the part of the basket — passenger and light-commercial vehicles — where the 115 thousand supported units were counted.
Reading the two statements together
Simple subtraction from the ministry's own figures shows how the December ceiling and the October band relate. To finish at the lower bound of 1.3 million units, November and December together must add about 100 thousand units to the ten-month total; to finish at the upper bound of 1.4 million, about 200 thousand; to reach the 1.5 million ceiling, about 300 thousand. Since the whole fourth quarter is expected at 350 thousand units including October, the two-month remainder is necessarily smaller than that, which is why the ceiling is phrased as an allowance — up to 1.5 million — rather than as an expectation. The December passenger-car range of 1.25–1.3 million units adds the segment split the October statement lacked: within a total market of up to 1.5 million, passenger cars are expected to account for the overwhelming majority of volume.
None of this changes the direction of the year. Both statements describe a market smaller than 2024 by roughly a quarter; both anchor the fourth quarter near 350 thousand units; both treat the 2023 level of about 1.3 million as the floor of the relevant comparison. What the December update changes is the upper edge of the picture and the granularity of it — a ten-month actual, a passenger-car sub-range and an explicit ceiling — and it confirms that the October band was a working forecast rather than a closing estimate.
What the shape of the decline tells us
Pulling the threads together, the 2025 picture has three defining features. The decline is broad, because the nine-month count covers vehicles of all types and still falls 24.6%. The decline is accelerating into the year-end, because the expected fourth quarter is weaker both year on year, at minus 28.7%, and quarter on quarter, at minus 13.9%. And the decline is cushioned but not stopped by policy, because a programme that moved about 115 thousand domestically produced vehicles in eight months coexists with an annual band a quarter below the previous year.
The forecast band itself, and its December extension up to 1.5 million units, is the fourth feature and the most instructive for readers of official numbers. A band of 1.3–1.4 million units around a nine-month actual of just over one million implies a fourth quarter that the ministry can estimate only within about one hundred thousand units; the December ceiling widens that tolerance further. Official forecasting in a contracting, policy-supported market is therefore best read as a corridor of plausible outcomes bounded by the quarterly ladder — 490.7, 406.7, 350 thousand — rather than as a point estimate.
Questions the coming quarters will answer
Three questions follow from the ministry's own figures and will decide whether 2025 is remembered as a one-year correction or as the first year of a longer descent. Will the preferential loan and leasing programmes keep their terms and their volume into 2026, or will the 115 thousand units of eight months prove to be the peak of policy support? Will the quarter-on-quarter slide of 13.9% continue into the first quarter of 2026, or will the weak base of the fourth quarter of 2025 finally start to flatter the year-on-year comparison? And will the passenger-car segment, placed at 1.25–1.3 million units for 2025, hold its share of the total market as the counted pool of all vehicle types shrinks? The October and December statements do not answer these questions; they define the baseline against which the answers will be measured.
For now, the ministry's arithmetic is internally consistent and externally sober: a nine-month market of just over one million units, a fourth quarter of about 350 thousand, a year of 1.3–1.4 million with a ceiling of up to 1.5 million allowed in December, and a 2023 reference of about 1.3 million that marks the boundary between a correction and a deeper reset. That is the shape of the Russian car market as the Ministry of Industry and Trade described it at the close of 2025.
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