Page 20 - RusRPTJul21

By 2030, 73,900 charging stations should appear in Russia, up from next to nothing now. It is proposed to allocate RUB181bn rubles to co-finance "fast" installations and their technical connection, and to create "slow" ones for private funds.
The ministry’s concept also includes a definition of a domestic electric car: until 2023, an electric car assembled in Russia will be considered Russian, but from 2024 a car needs to have had the welding and painting done in the country, and from 2025 localization should have extended to assembly of engines and the production of batteries to get the “made in Russia” label.
Until about 2023, the plan is to subsidize every EV sale domestically, and then gradually the level of subsidies to cover 10% of the sales in 2030 once the market has been created. These subsidies will require RUB121bn reports The Bell.
2.8 Watcom
Russia’s Watcom shopping index, which measures foot traffic in Moscow’s largest malls, started to show a stronger recovery between the middle of April and the middle of May, and is approaching levels not seen since 2019.
As the chart shows, the index crashed to historical lows at the start of April last year as the country was put on a strict lockdown in week 14 (April 1) and the population was forced to stay at home for much of the early summer.
The year-on-year comparisons with 2020 have been rendered meaningless, but the index has improved dramatically when compared with 2019.
The crisis started at the beginning of March, when Russia refused to renew the so-called OPEC+ oil production cut deal, which led to a collapse in oil prices and a devaluation of the ruble. The start of the pandemic only a few weeks later only compounded these problems dramatically.
The shopping index in the first few crisis-free months of 2021 was still some 20%-25% y/y down from 2019, the first year of strong growth since the last oil price shock in 2014, but shopping in malls has also been losing ground to the rise of online shopping, which is the fastest growing segment of the Russian economy in recent years.
Shopping foot traffic levels this year remained down by a quarter compared to 2019 levels throughout April, but things began to change in week 18 (May 3) at the start of the 10-day-long May Day holidays, when foot traffic jumped to an index score of 397.7, only 14.4% less than the 464.8 seen in the same week in 2019.
Traffic continued to recover the following week as this year’s index score rose above the 400 level for the second time, and stayed there. The index briefly rose to 402 in week 9 (March 1) but fell back below 400 the following week.
20 RUSSIA Country Report July 2021 www.intellinews.com