Apollo Tyres MD: ‘Our emphasis is back on America’

10 years after Apollo Tyres’ bid to acquire Cooper Tire fell through, vice-chairman and managing director Neeraj Kanwar says the company is putting its emphasis back on North America and even hinted at the goal of building a tyre production facility there.

In an interview with The Times, London-based Kanwar reflected on lessons learnt in 10 years in the UK capital. Apollo Tyres’ top executive made the move to London around the time of the erstwhile Cooper bid, so it isn’t surprising that the subject of North America came up again.

The latest details are that Apollo Tyres is something like a quarter of the way towards its goal of building a factory in North America:

“We have an Atlanta office, with around 35 employees and Apollo truck tyres are gaining very good traction there. We should be closing around $100 million in sales this year. We need to create a market of $300 million to $400 million in revenue before we look at a brownfield or greenfield site in North America.”

“Until then,” Kanwar continued: “we import the tyres. To put in a greenfield is very capital intensive, so we need to just hold back now for the next three to four years.”

All of this forms part of Apollo Tyres plans of becoming a $5-billion-dollar company by 2026, with the MD explaining: “We gave ourselves five years. We need to improve our return on capital employed, which is below 10 per cent. We want to get it to 12 per cent. We want retail margins to go beyond 15 per cent and we want our net debt equity ratios to go below two.”