A key focus of Apollo Tyres’ medium-term strategy in Europe has been original equipment deliveries in the truck and bus sector. The tyre maker has realised this with its first partnership, which sees it supply Apollo EnduTrax tyres for the Iveco Way ranges.
Apollo Tyres wants to build its European market share alongside the development of the commercial vehicle tyre production line at its advanced Hungarian plant. Hosting Tyres & Accessories in the final quarter of 2022, the growing manufacturer detailed its strategic five-year plan to build its presence in Europe’s truck and bus, radial (TBR) tyre market alongside the launch of its EnduMile LHT, a long haul trailer tyre targeting the continent, its first to feature A-grade fuel efficiency on the European tyre label. Apollo is taking measures to double its TBR tyre production output from the Gyöngyöshalász facility, with the target of covering up to 90 per cent of the TBR segment’s total size and specification requirements by 2025.
Apollo Tyres aims for at least 40 per cent of the raw materials it uses by 2030 to be sustainable, and to show what it can already achieve the tyre maker has produced an agricultural tyre containing 75 per cent sustainable materials. Although just a concept, Apollo is evaluating the product’s potential commercialisation.
Apollo Tyres Ltd. maintained its market share within Europe’s passenger car and light truck (PCLT) market in the three months to 31 December 2022 (Q3 FY2023) despite declining approximately 14 per cent year-on-year in this market. The tyre maker primarily attributes this negative growth to high channel inventory, a mild winter and the economic slowdown.
At the start of 2022, several sources on social media shared a chart suggesting that Apollo Tyres is the biggest tyre manufacturer by market share. And what’s more, Michelin was nowhere to be seen. “Don’t believe every meme you see” is great advice for everyone, but for us “check your sources” is a basic rule of thumb. So, we had to take a closer look at those market share claims and found that, while there’s no smoke without fire and they do relate some truth, there is also a fair bit more to the story.
A survey commissioned by Apollo Tyres has found that only six per cent of motorists in the UK are able to correctly identify a tyre’s load rating. Worse still, it turns out we’re only half as good at accomplishing this task as the Germans are. Thankfully, younger Brits give hope that this may change in future.
Apollo Tyres (UK) Holdings Ltd, a subsidiary of Apollo Tyres Ltd, has been recognised as one of the Top Employers in the UK. The certification, awarded by the Top Employer Institute, a global authority on HR excellence, was based on an in-depth survey of Apollo Tyres Ltd’s London staff. The firm has an annual revenue of $2.8 billion. Its London team work in areas such as finance, digital and US trade growth.
Following a three-stage validation process that began in August 2022, auditors from TÜV SÜD have granted Apollo Tyres ISO 20400:2017 for its raw material procurement process. The tyre maker notes that it is the “first company in the Indian automotive sector” to gain this certification.
Apollo Tyres has appointed Shobhit Arora as its new Country Sales Manager for the UK. He brings over 14 years of experience at Apollo Tyres to the role, having begun his career as a Graduate Engineer Trainee for the company in India in 2008. Since then, Arora has worked across many areas of the business in India and Europe, most recently as Distribution and Business Development Manager at Apollo Tyres’ European headquarters in the Netherlands.
As part of its ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) commitment, Apollo Tyres has set a range of goals for the coming years, including carbon neutrality by 2050. The commitments are as follows:
Passenger car and light truck (PCLT) tyre production trends in Western Europe have been scaling down over the long-term. The move to larger production facilities in the comparatively low-cost labour markets in Eastern Europe, or greater reliance on imports from Asia, has seen a steady stream of plant closures and conversions to speciality, short-run production capacity – on in the case of Cooper Tire’s UK plant, for example, one followed by the other – in the region. A new assessment of the most recent three-year period by tyre industry analyst Astutus Research suggests that the overall picture has been of a decline similar to the period following the 2008 financial crisis, which was itself a catalyst for this trend. Yet digging a little deeper into the figures shows several dynamics at play in European PCLT tyre production, including supply chain disruption and spiralling energy costs. For comprehensive analysis of global tyre market trends, a series of reports by Astutus Research are available to buy now in the Tyrepress Reports Shop – click here for more details.
Apollo Tyres will enter the European long-haul trailer market with its new commercial vehicle tyre, the EnduMile LHT. The first Apollo truck tyre to achieve an A-grade rating for fuel efficiency on the European tyre label, Apollo says the tyre will be the most durable and lowest rolling resistance truck-sector tyre it has ever produced. The tyre was launched at the manufacturer’s advanced production facility in Gyöngyöshalász, Hungary, where it is to be manufactured. The EnduMile LHT will be available to customers across Europe from early 2023.
During Apollo Tyres’s recent celebration of 25 years of Traxion agricultural tyre technology, Europe president Benoit Rivallant set an ambitious target of growing the company’s off-highway tyre (OHT) revenue by 50 per cent. In Europe, 16 per cent of total revenue originates from the off-highway tyre sector. This compares with 63 per cent from passenger car tyres, 12 per cent from truck and bus tyres, 8 per cent from spare tyres, 1 per cent from bicycle tyres and 1 per cent from other products. In other words, the 16 per cent originating from off-highway tyre sales is a strategically important figure, 92 per cent of which comes from the agricultural sub-segment. Tyres & Accessories took time out with the company’s European head in order to find out more about how executives plan to achieve such ambitious targets in the context of a broadly challenging tyre market environment.
Trailer manufacturer Schwarzmüller has selected Apollo Tyres’ EnduRace RT, EnduRace RT2 and EnduTrax MAHD tyres as original equipment for its truck trailers. This is Apollo’s first original equipment deal in the European truck sector.
With a market share around 30%, the Apollo brand is the strongest player in India’s enormous commercial vehicle segment. It only arrived in the UK five years ago, but Apollo Tyres’ truck and bus radial range is already very much at home here and well positioned for further growth. We recently caught up with Apollo to find out more.
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