PARIS (Reuters) – French carmaker Renault said sales at its flagship brand fell for the fourth consecutive year in 2022 to 1,466,729 units excluding Russia, a 9.4% decline from 2021.
The Renault group, which fared worse than most rivals during the COVID-19 crisis and supply chain snags caused mainly by a chip shortage, is in the middle of a turnaround in a drive to boost profits.
In November, it unveiled a major overhaul that will see it separate its activities in five businesses, deepen ties with China’s Geely and spin off its electric vehicles unit through a stock market listing this year. It is also in talks with Japanese partner Nissan to reboot their long-standing alliance.
Renault is betting on higher-margin and electric cars to drive growth. It said that in 2022 the Renault brand, which accounts for two-thirds of group sales, was the third European brand for electrified vehicle sales with 228,000 units sold, an increase of 12% from 2021.
Its global market share was 4%, shrinking 0.5 percentage points from a year earlier.
(Reporting by Gilles Guillaume and Silvia Aloisi; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
