New warehouse for Nokian Tyres’ USA plant

Nokian Tyres has begun construction work on a finished goods warehouse at the Dayton, Tennessee production site where it is currently doubling production capacity for all-season and all-weather tyres and adding light truck tyres to the product mix. Groundbreaking for the 350,000 square foot (approx. 32,500m²) facility took place in early March and Nokian Tyres expects it will be ready for use by mid-2024. Nokian Tyres is implementing these projects with an investment of around US$174 million.

The warehouse will hold as many as 600,000 tyres and sit adjacent to the Dayton factory, whose production capacity will double to four million tyres per year by 2024, produced by a 475-strong workforce that includes 125 recent hires. This storage space will join the company’s nine-warehouse network throughout the US and Canada and will serve a growing volume of customers in the southernmost states of the USA.

Automatic tyre stacking

Describing the planned warehouse as a “high-tech complement to the Dayton factory,” Nokian Tyres shares that automated conveyors will deliver tyres from the plant to the warehouse via an overhead bridge that connects the buildings. At the warehouse, they will be automatically stacked into steel storage racks without being touched by hand.

“As Nokian Tyres grows in Southeast Tennessee and throughout North America, this storage warehouse will help us manage the increased volume of tyres flowing to our customers,” says Tommi Heinonen, vice president of Passenger Car and LT Tires at Nokian Tyres. “It’s another step forward in our quest to deliver safe, sustainable tyres for North American drivers.”

Strategically important facility

“As this marks our fourteenth tyre facility build, we are proud to contribute our unique understanding and experience to this strategically important facility for Nokian Tyres,” adds Chris Burns, president of BC Construction Group, the firm tasked with designing and building the warehouse. Nokian Tyres is continuing its long-term partnership with Faithful+Gould to provide project management services for the facility, and Jonathan Marshall, senior vice president, comments that the company is “thrilled to continue the partnership with Nokian Tyres that started in 2017 for the construction of the Dayton Factory.”

Nokian Tyres opened its Dayton factory in autumn 2019 and began producing tyres for commercial sale in early 2020. The tyre maker is implementing the current capacity expansion by adding equipment inside the existing factory footprint. It anticipates producing the first light truck tyres in Dayton before the end of this year.