Hankook to bring Korea R&D activities under one roof
Within the next two years Hankook Tire intends to open Korea’s largest tyre research and development centre. The tyre maker has announced plans to shift its main R&D operations to a new 66,000 square metre centre in the city of Daejeon; company vice chairman and CEO Seung Hwa Suh and Daejeon Metropolitan City mayor Hong-Chul Yum have already placed their signatures on a contract covering the relocation. Construction work on the centre should be finished by 2013.
The new will unite the various research and development departments at Hankook Tire under one roof. The company’s current centre will be converted and used in the future for research work on new production technologies and for tyre testing, work that currently is undertaken at the tyre maker’s Geumsan site.
“The ongoing growth of Hankook Tire is driven by the continuing investments in research and development. Our tyre constructors are some of the best in the world and they develop tyres at the highest technical level,” commented Seung Hwa Suh. “We have ambitious goals. With the new R&D centre, we will extend our technological advantage even further so that we can continue to supply customers throughout the world with top quality tyres.”
Hankook states that sustainable growth has always been a fixed part of its business philosophy and says the new centre will facilitate its entry into “a new research era of environmentally-friendly materials and technologies.” The new centre will complement several others that Hankook Tire operates globally; the Europe Technical Center in Germany develops and tweaks high performance tyres for the European market, and research centres are also located in China, Japan and the USA. Every year, the tyre manufacturer invests around five per cent of its profits in research and development. Six per cent of all Hankook Tire employees work exclusively in its research centres.
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