French group Renault might decide to assemble Dacia cars at its factory in Russia, within a project worth 300 million dollars, by which the group intends to produce 120,000 cars annually, according to just-auto.com auto news online agency.
“This would be great for Dacia,” Automobile Dacia general manager Constantin Stroe told Ziarul Financiar. “I know that Renault had made investments in Russia a few months before establishing its plant in Romania and I also know that Russia is an interesting market,” Stroe added.
Renault owns 50% of OAO Avtoframos factory in Moscow, where it only assembled Megane Classic and R19 models, belonging to CKD collections (completely knocked down, which need basic assembling operations) from the group’s plant in Turkey.
This year, output will stand at only 1,000 cars, following decrease in demand on the Russian market, where 85% of recently sold cars cost below 5,000 dollars. In this context, the future 5,000 euro Dacia, which is to be launched in 2003-2004, would be quite appropriate for the Russian market.
Renault officials stated from the very beginning that they intended to produce several hundred thousands cars at Dacia, as compared to less than 100,000 at present, most of them being aimed at exports, especially towards emerging markets.
“We knew from the very beginning that Renault was not going to produce cars only for Romanian customers, but also for export,” Dacia general manager commented.
“Exporting CKD collections would allow output stabilisation,” he added, referring to the Romanian auto market, which posted low demand this year, thus cutting the degree of using the production capacity of the Pitesti-based plant.
Avtoframos has recently assembled several Renault Clio Symbol models, and is to produce 3,000 cars in 2001, just-auto.com reports. For a price of about 8,500 dollars, the model is still rather expensive for the Russian market.
“The Russian market is quite appropriate for the 5,000 euro car Renault is currently developing for Dacia, but it is too soon to talk about it,” said Guy Bara, Avtoframos general manager.