Yokohama consolidates OTR tyre businesses into Yokohama Off-Highway Tires

The Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd. is consolidating its various off-highway businesses into a single entity. The new division – Yokohama Off-Highway Tires – will include Alliance Tire Group (ATG), which Yokohama bought four years ago and Yokohama’s off-the-road (OTR) tyre businesses across the globe. The move can also be interpreted as a prelude to the announcement of the result of Yokohama’s bid for the Prometeon tyre business, talks about which got underway last year.

According to the company, Yokohama Off-Highway Tires will have a global footprint with leadership team distributed between Tokyo, Boston, Amsterdam and Mumbai. Yokohama Rubber’s current medium-term management plan, the Grand Design 2020 (GD2020) includes a commercial tyre strategy that targets “Positioning commercial tyres as a pillar of growth in our second century and off-highway tires as a growth driver.”

The consolidation is designed to integrate “Yokohama Rubber’s brand power, high quality, and global sales network with ATG’s high growth potential, diverse product line-up, and superior cost competitiveness. In addition, the unified global entity will offer the full-range of OHT, from small forklift tyres to ultra-large ROTR (radial off-the-road) tyres to meet a wide range of customer needs in the global OHT market for tyres used on construction and industrial vehicles as well as agricultural and forestry machinery.”

As the first step in this consolidation, Yokohama Rubber’s OTR tyre business in USA will be combined with Alliance Tire Americas Inc. (ATA) on 1 January 2021. The combined entity will be named as Yokohama Off-Highway Tires America Inc. Integration plans for rest of the world are being finalized and will be communicated in the near future.

Yokohama Off-Highway Tires America Inc will be based in Wakefield, Massachusetts (currently ATA’s head office). And the current ATA president, Dhaval Nanavati, will help up the business.

Tyres & Accessories contacted Yokohama representatives for further comment on whether or not the formation of Yokohama Off-Highway Tires is connected to its bid for Prometeon. So far they have declined to comment.