Bridgestone to close Italian pcr plant
Last May, Bridgestone celebrated the golden jubilee of its Bari passenger car tyre factory in Italy. There will be no diamond jubilee, however; on 4 March, Bridgestone Europe stated that the plant will be closed. Operations at the Bari facility are expected to cease within the first half of 2014, although the exact timing of the closure, along with terms and conditions, are yet to be discussed. Bridgestone says it is “immediately available to start the discussion to identify the best solution in order to minimise, as much as possible, the social impact of the decision on the approximately 950 employees involved, in line with the culture of the group.”
The decision to close the Bari plant was taken following an “in-depth analysis of the structural changes which have taken place over the last two years in the tyre market both in Europe and globally,” the tyre maker comments. Bridgestone looked at information and analysis from independent external sources and determined that the overall passenger car tyre segment within the European Union declined from 300 million units in 2011 to 261 million in 2012, a 13 per cent reduction, and no recovery to pre-2011 volume is foreseen before 2020. The only segment with positive forecasts is premium.
Manufacturers in emerging countries were also named as a decisive factor. Bridgestone says the sector is “suffering from increasing pressure” from producers in these lands, due to the cost competitiveness advantages they hold. They have, in Bridgestone’s words, been “continuously increasing their market share in the low-range segment, where they enjoy significant advantages in terms of production costs, at the expense of the major, quality tyre manufacturers such as Bridgestone.”
In response to these factors, Bridgestone says it is “reprioritising its production” to focus on the premium segment of the market. This is bad news for Bari; Bridgestone describes the plant as “characterised by a production mainly based on products today considered of general use,” adding that it is “also penalised on the cost point of view by factors such as logistic costs and energy costs.”
Bridgestone said it made “repeated efforts” to overhaul the Bari plant in order to meet these new challenges; equipment for producing UHP tyres was installed in the factory in 2009-2010 and the supply of Bari-produced run-flat tyres to BMW was approved in 2011. However the tyre maker indicates that Bari is still, relative to its other European plants, not in a strong position to accommodate the structural decrease in demand and shift towards premium products that has taken place. Therefore, Bridgestone states it has been left “with no other choice than to proceed with the closure of this site.” It adds that the decision was taken after a thorough analysis of all possible alternatives, but it says “none of these were feasible.”
Bari is presently one of eight Bridgestone tyre plants in Europe, the others being located in Spain, France, Poland and Hungary. In announcing the closure of the Bari plant, Bridgestone stresses that this decision “will not have any effect on the other existing group entities in Italy, one of the key markets in Europe, including the Technical Centre Europe near Rome and the sales office in Agrate Brianza.”
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