Sentury will significantly increase production capacity in 2023

Sentury’s revenue and net profit in 2022 increased year-on-year. The tyre manufacturer’s annual report shows that last year’s revenue was 6.29 billion yuan (about £760 million; €860 million), an increase of 21.53 per cent. Net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 800 million yuan (approximately £97 million; €1.1 billion), an increase of 6.3 per cent.

Sentury’s two existing manufacturing bases are in Qingdao, China and Thailand, with an annual production capacity of 28 million tyres, but plans to build tyre manufacturing bases in Spain and Morocco. During the reporting period, the tyre maker’s capacity utilisation rate was 76.75 per cent. Sentury reportedly produced 21.9863 million tyres in 2022, a decrease of 2.02 per cent compared with 2021, and sold 22.6325 million tyres, an increase of 6.55 per cent.

Sentury claims the company’s production scale and capacity in 2023 will significantly improve. According to the annual report, the investment progress of the second phase of Sentury’s Thailand plant exceeded 85 per cent by the end of 2022 and it is expected to be put into large-scale production in 2023. If the second phase of the Thailand plant can reach the designed production capacity, Sentury will supply an additional 6 million semi-steel radial tyres and 2 million all-steel radial tyres to the market each year.

In addition, the tyre company revealed its sales model in its annual report. Sentury said it had formed a sales pattern that takes the overseas replacement market as the core sales area, continues cultivating the domestic replacement market, and tackles the global mid-to-high-end OEM market.

The overseas market has been Sentury’s advantage in the past few years. In 2022, export and overseas revenue accounted for 87.85 per cent of the tyre manufacturer’s total revenue, not far from 87.33 per cent in 2021. However, considering that the company’s revenue in 2022 increased by 21.53 per cent year-on-year, the growth of its overseas business is considerable. Specifically, Sentury’s export and overseas revenue last year increased by about 1 billion yuan compared with 2021. Sentury said that with the pressure of consumption contraction brought about by the inflationary pressure in the European and American markets and the high-cost performance makes its products more competitive in overseas markets.