Russia’s Industry Ministry expects car sales to halve in 2022 as the country’s automobile industry grapples with supply issues, a senior official said.

“We saw a sharp fall (in car sales) in April and May,” Tigran Parsadanyan, deputy head of the ministry’s automotive and railway engineering department, said on Thursday.

“We expect that some 750,000 cars will be sold on the market by the end of the year.”

That figure represents a 51% drop in sales year-on-year.

The Association of European Businesses (AEB) said on Monday that sales of new cars in Russia in May slid 83.5% year-on-year to 24,268 vehicles. It expects car sales to fall by at least 50% this year.