OREANDA-NEWS  The debt burden of AvtoVAZ is more than 100 billion rubles, the automaker seeks to minimize it, said Maxim Sokolov, president of the company. "Quite high. It amounts to more than 100 billion rubles. Of course, it has a floating character, since some credit lines are being closed, some credit lines are being opened again. At the same time — especially taking into account last year's high Central Bank rate — we paid more than 10 billion percent on the group. That is, this money could be used for the development of AvtoVAZ and component industry enterprises, the development of new models," he said in an interview with Rossiya 24 TV channel, answering a question about the debt burden of the enterprise.

"This burden is quite large for the financial model we are working on. Therefore, we strive to minimize it and hope that some mechanisms may be adopted that can support it," Sokolov added.

AvtoVAZ owns production sites in Togliatti and Izhevsk. In mid-May last year, French Renault transferred its stake in AvtoVAZ (67.69%) to the state ownership of the Russian Federation. The new management of AvtoVAZ has announced its intention to resume production of almost the entire model line in 2023. Now the brand consists of four model families: Vesta, Largus, Granta and Niva. Sales of the brand's cars in 2022 amounted to 188.6 thousand cars (-46% by 2021).