MAZ Is Losing Russian Market
4- 16.04.2025, 10:32
- 3,974
Sales have decreased many times.
In March 2025, 24 new buses of the Minsk Automobile Plant were sold on the Russian market — almost 3.3 times less than a year earlier (79), writes Pozirk with a reference to the Russian agency “ASM-Holding”.
In January-March, 39 Belarusian buses were sold (5.8 times less than a year earlier). The share of MAZ products in the market of this transport segment last month was 3.2%.
The largest number of buses in the reporting month were sold by PAZ — 401 (- 65.7%), Yutong — 98 (- 42.7%) and LiAZ — 71 (- 53.6%).
In total, in 2024, MAZ sold 504 units of this equipment in the Russian Federation.
MAZ buses regularly catch fire in Russia
On October 22, 2024, a fire was reported in Samara on a MAZ bus (2018 model year), which was at the final stop near a shopping center, there were no passengers on it. According to preliminary information, the cause was a wiring fault.
On January 3 last year, a MAZ bus belonging to the Domtransavto company caught fire in St. Petersburg.
According to Russian media, at least nine buses of the Minsk Automobile Plant caught fire in this city in 2023. A year earlier, eight similar cases were recorded.
“Due to the presence of comments that could potentially lead to a fire in the buses, a decision was made to suspend the operation of 137 buses of the Minsk Automobile Plant (MAZ 203 047) on the city route network. They arrived in St. Petersburg under 2022 contracts,” the press service of the state enterprise Passazhiravtotrans reported on August 2, 2023.
In response to a request from the Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg Kirill Polyakov in June 2022, MAZ reported that the cause of the fires could be “oil from the fan hydraulic drive system getting onto hot parts of the engine.”
“Under the conditions of sanctions pressure and disruption of logistics chains during the supply of hydraulic drive kits, the tested flanges could have been replaced with others that are similar in technical characteristics, but do not have tested references,” the official explained.
Cases of Minsk Automobile Plant buses catching fire have also been recorded in Belarus.
The problem with Belarusian buses was indirectly acknowledged by Lukashenka, who stated on September 19, 2023, at a meeting with the Governor of the Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation Veniamin Kondratyev that the reason for the fires of passenger transport in St. Petersburg lies in the lack of “high-quality and timely maintenance”. He proposed to establish on-site maintenance by Belarusian repairmen.
At a press conference on October 25, Mikalai Lakotka, Deputy Chief Designer for Trucks at Minsk Automobile Plant, said that the reasons for the frequent fires of the enterprise's equipment in the Russian Federation are the violation of the operating conditions and rules.
According to him, the equipment has become “very heavy, energy-intensive, while no one has canceled the operating conditions and rules.”
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