Apollo Tyres has launched its new alloy wheel brand, Acelere Wheelz. The first products in the range, the ‘Fall-Winter’ collection, are already available through tyre dealerships across India. Apollo Tyres says that a new collection will be introduced onto the Indian market every six months, in line with its concept of the wheels as fashion accessories. The company comments that the Acelere Wheelz range is a ‘natural extension’ to its tyre range.
Two new senior appointments have been made at the Apollo Tyres’ owned companies Dunlop Zimbabwe and National Tyre Services (NTS). In a statement, Dunlop Tyres Group chief executive officer, Dr. Luis Ceneviz, said Mr. Kennedy Mandevani, who is currently Dunlop Zimbabwe managing director, will assume the position of group managing director for National Tyre Services. Mandevani’s portfolio will cover both NTS and Dunlop, said Ceneviz.
The lockout at PTL Enterprises Ltd in India appears to have reached a stalemate, with both parties sticking to their respective positions without compromise. According to an official at Apollo Tyres, the employees’ unions demand that the lockout end as a pre-condition to enter into further negotiations, while management at the Apollo Tyres supplier say the company will end the lockout only after the issues are discussed and settled.
Apollo Tyres Ltd has reported a nearly 90 per cent fall in net profits in the third quarter of the company’s 2008/2009 financial year. Consolidated net profit after tax totalled just 89 million rupees (£1.254 million, 1.383 million euros) compared with 820 million rupees (£11.553 million, 12.749 million euros) in the previous year. The greatly reduced profits come off the back of a roughly 10 per cent decline in consolidated revenue, which fell from 12.4 billion rupees (£175 million, 193 million euros) to 11 billion rupees (£155.074 million, 171.234 million euros).
After five weeks of lock out conditions at the factory under lease to Apollo Tyres, plant management and union representatives appear to have made little or no progress in resolving their differences. A January 7 meeting conveyed by the labour minister of India’s Kerala state, PK Gurudasan, broke down when the two parties could not reach a consensus on the list of 12 items management views as essential for the factory’s ongoing viability. Union representatives agreed to consider just three, and said the remaining proposals would be discussed only after the lockout was lifted.
Apollo Tyres and leading national automotive magazine Auto India have on January 8 held their “Apollo Tyres Auto India Best Brand Survey Awards”, recognising the merits of various Indian market two and four-wheel vehicle manufacturers. The recipients of the awards were decided upon based on questionnaires filled in and returned by approximately 1,072 Auto India and Business India readers. Award categories included, amongst others, “reliable”, “well-made product”, “good customer service and advanced technology”.
The unions representing workers involved in the PTL factory lockout in India are said to have bolstered their resolve following the breakdown of their second discussion with company management. According to India’s Express News Service, union leaders are accusing the Apollo Tyres supplier of changing their demands each time employees agree to the previous set.
“The workers have already agreed to the conditions put forward by the management for capacity utilisation in the wake of recession,” said Premier Tyres Employees Union president K N Raveendranath. “But, the management is behaving with certain ulterior motive and putting forward fresh set of demands every time.
Apollo Tyres, the sole recipient of products manufactured by PTL Enterprises, has expressed its hope that unions will work with management to save the jobs of more than 1,000 employees at the company’s Kalamassery factory. A list of 12 items management consider inherent for the survival of the factory were on the agenda at a January 7 meeting convened by the Kerala state labour minister, Mr P K Gurudasan. Of these 12 items, reports Apollo Tyres, unions agreed to consider only three. The remainder, they said, would be discussed only after the lockout is lifted. This has, says Apollo, left management “completely disheartened”, as it says previous lockouts have also taken this route without resolution to a single pending request taking place. All 12 items, says the Indian manufacturer, relate to better manufacturing practices and the need to expand and modernise for higher efficiencies. Company management has also appealed to the Kerala State Government to play a positive role, which it says will result in better industrial standards, more employment and even higher Government revenues.
A meeting held on January 7 to discuss the lockout at the PTL factory in Kalamassery, India, which exclusively supplies Apollo Tyres, has failed to find a viable means of ending the standoff between management and unions. Following the breakdown of talks trade union leaders allegedly decided to hold a meeting of their own the following day.
The lockout began on December 6, 2008, following what Apollo Tyres referred to as “negative and non-cooperative attitude of workmen”.
Apollo has announced that 15 new tennis-playing youngsters will join the 21 children selected last year at the FIST Academy in Bangalore, taking the total number of Apollo Tyres tennis scholarships to 36. Mission 2018 represents the tyre manufacturer’s financial commitment to helping India gain a Grand Slam winner by the titular year.
Speaking on behalf of Apollo Tyres, Avik Chattopadhyay, head of Corporate Marketing and project leader for Apollo Tyres Mission 2018 said, “It’s been an amazing journey this year. We had six, seven and eight year olds participating in the selection camps from across the country. We also had participation from an NRI from Tanzania and few of them coming all the way from places like Imphal and Jorhat. This batch will further enrich the programme and Mission 2018’s prospect of bringing Grand Slam glory to India.” He added, “We have selected this time a tiny six-year-old girl from Ahmedabad who first picked up a tennis racquet when she was a little over one year old! This clearly shows the kind of passion for sport we have in India.”
The second year of short-listing for the Apollo Tyres’ “Mission 2018” tennis scheme concluded on the weekend of December 21-22 in Hyderabad, India, with the induction of 15 children from across the country. This number adds to last year’s 21 children who have been training over the past 12 months at the FIST Academy in Bangalore, taking the total number of Apollo Tyres tennis scholarships to 36.
Following news that Apollo has cut prices across the board in line with the four per cent reduction in India’s Central VAT rate, Ceat and JK Tyre have announced similar cuts of 3.6 and 3 per cent respectively on the average price of their products.
Apollo’s chairman, Onkar Kanwar wrote in a statement, following yesterday’s announcement on India’s cenvat, “We will be passing on this reduction to our customers, strengthening the measures that are being taken at a federal level.
“We do hope this, and other measures together, will boost production and consumer spending,” he concluded. JK’s director, AS Mehta voiced similar hopes: “Once the end user is benefited, it should benefit the entire industry.”
Apollo Tyres gave word on December 6 that a plant owned by PTL Enterprises that produces tyres exclusively for Apollo entered a lockout situation as of 2am December 6. Tension between workers and employers at the Kalamassery based factory, in India’s Kerala state, has been uneasy for some time. According to Apollo, for the past few months “workmen have been resisting management efforts to increase efficiency and bring down costs, during these times of economic stress and demand slowdown.”
Leading Indian tyre maker, Apollo has announced that it has cut its prices across its product range by around four per cent. India has reduced its Cenvat (Central VAT) by the same figure on 7 December. Apollo’s price cut is effective as of 1 December.
Goodyear and NASA have, in the US tyre major’s own words “taken one small step backward to make one giant leap forward” in their preparation for future missions to the moon and to Mars. A project jointly funded by Goodyear and the NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) has recently been completed. This project called for the development and production of twelve exact copies of the original wire-mesh moon tyre used on the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle in the early 1970s. The creation of these replicates was, says Goodyear, the first step toward understanding this unique non-pneumatic tyre technology, and its applications on both the moon and Earth.
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