Mashinniy Dvor, the car dealer, is about to enter Yekaterinburg’s car market, the company’s press officer reports. They have already reached an agreement with Sberbank’s West-Ural branch and will receive 1.8 billion RUR in terms of credit. This money is to be directed to financing a development project aimed at putting up show rooms and maintenance centers in Ural Federal District and Privolzhskiy Federal District. The project requires a total of 2.64 billion RUR worth of investments, with 70% of the financing to be supplied by Sberbank and 30% to be produced by the company itself.

The automobile holding has already bought a number of land allotments in Yekaterinburg and Ufa and is planning on both putting up its own show rooms as well as buying the existing dealers’ businesses with two – of four-thousand-square-meter show rooms. Mashinniy Dvor has the official dealers of General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, Renault, Ford, Skoda, Volkswagen, and Honda in mind.

‘The provincial automobile market has been expanding on a larger scale than the one in the capital for the last two years or so, and car dealers are now operating in both large regional cities and smaller, less densely populated towns,’ says the company’s Marketing Director Alexei Razorvin.

‘While Perm, Chelyabinsk, and Tyumen’s markets are saturated in terms of both the number of car dealers and the capacity of maintenance centers, Yekaterinburg is quite a different story. The shortage of popular car makes is keenly felt, and having a car serviced is a problem due to maintenance centers being overloaded. So, more car centers in the region’s cities and towns will be a solution to the problem,’ he notes.