Brazil
To maintain its production of synthetic rubber after its utilisation of DAE oils ceases, Lanxess AG will enter into a strategic co-operation with Swedish oil producer Nynas. Lanxess will end the use of DAE oils in its synthetic rubber production as of December 1, 2009, ahead of next year’s European and Japanese bans on the substance.
Formula One tyre supplier Bridgestone has announced the final compound allocations for the remaining four rounds of the 2009 FIA Formula One World Championship. The company says Brazil it is making a return to the allocation philosophy of leaving a rubber stiffness gap between allocated tyres for the Grands Prix at Suzuka, Japan and Interlagos, Brazil. Consecutive compounds will be used at Singapore and Abu Dhabi, UAE.
A chunk of Ruia Group company Falcon Tyres will be sold in order to increase ouput at its factory in Mysore, eastern India, and to ensure its promoters shareholder remains below the 75 per cent required to stay listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The share, according to Indian media, is to be sold to a private equity firm for Rs 1 billion (£12.6 million).
“We are in the process of preparing our presentation and hope to be through with the placement within the next two months,” Falcon Tyres chairman Pawan Kumar Ruia told the Hindu Business Line. Ruia reports that the promoters’ share in the company went up to 86 per cent following the recently concluded open offer requiring either a public issue or private placement.
This year Pirelli celebrates 80 years of doing business in Brazil. In the eight decades that followed the company’s first presence there in 1929, Pirelli has established five factories and a research centre in the South American nation and manufactures 90 per cent of its South American production there. This strong presence reflects Brazil’s growing importance as a strategic centre for vehicle production, and Pirelli’s interest in the region remains strong. At a July press conference, held at the company’s Santo André manufacturing site in Sao Paulo, Pirelli outlined plans to invest a further US$200 million in Brazil over the next three years.
With a record 1,443 exhibiting companies from 47 countries and 150,000 square metres of exhibition space, Autopromotec is recognised as a leading international trade exhibition for specialised automotive products and services. This biennial event was held at the Bologna Exhibition Centre in late May. The increasing number of exhibiting companies from outside the host nation was particularly apparent this year, with a total of 468 foreign businesses from 46 countries presenting their products.
Also, despite the current global economic downturn, the continually evolving international influence of the event is manifest in the number of foreign visitors present. During the five days of Autopromotec there were a total of 101,620 visitors, 16,689 of whom were from overseas. As part of a joint agreement sealed betweenthe Italian Institute for Foreign Trade, the Italian Ministry for Economic Development and the Italian Automotive Service Equipment Manufacturers Association, the show hosted 90 trade delegations from 16 countries including: Argentina, Brazil, China, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, USA and Vietnam.
Continental Tire North America has announced that it has acquired the majority ownership of a leading passenger, light truck and commercial tyre company in Latin America, Compania Ecuatoriana del Caucho S.A. “Majority ownership of ERCO provides Continental with the ability to improve our entire value chain — from the rubber plantation to the retail stores — throughout the Americas region through ERCO’s strong competence in the tyre business,” said Matthias Schoenberg, chief executive officer of Continental Tire The Americas. “Our plan is to have ERCO manage the six countries of the Andean region so that we can expand our business in these critical growth markets which, together, have a larger population size than that of Mexico, but with faster growth.”
Following a net loss of Rm 12.8 million (£2.2 million) in 2008, Malaysia’s Goodway Integrated Industries anticipates returning into the black this year thanks to increasing demand and weaker raw material prices. Following the company’s annual general meeting on June 23, company CEO Tai Boon Wee told the Kuala Lumpur based Business Times that “yes, we will definitely see profit this year. Orders have been picking up since the second quarter of this year and our third quarter [performance] is showing better business and profit.”
In preparation for better times the retreader and compound supplier is placing an emphasis upon export market expansion – Brazil and Turkey are two locations named as upcoming recipients of extra attention.
Various online celebrity news sources are helping to build on the hype for the 2010 Pirelli Calendar, which has reportedly begun shooting in Brazil. Interest is particularly high in the tyre manufacturer’s homeland Italy, where the national edition of Vanity Fair has featured the 2010 models on its front cover, and Australia, the country in which the most high-profile model, Miranda Kerr, was born. The Cal 2010 will feature the photographic work of renowned eroticist Terry Richardson from the USA, with modelling by Kerr’s fellow Australians Abbey Lee Kershaw and Catherine McNeil.
Kerr has appeared nude in various media several times already this year, addressing the plight of koala bears and the plight of spotty teenagers in Rolling Stone magazine. Reports suggest that the 2010 Cal will feature one photograph in which the model wears only a hat, while McNeil will pour milk over her own naked body. The censored pictures are available at the end of a simple Google picture search.
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European truck OE tyre demand fell at the fastest rate in the world in May (-72.9 per cent), according to recently released Michelin market data. Putting the company’s (and the industry as a whole’s) difficulties into perspective, Deutsche Bank analysts summed up the worst of the current volumes like this: “eight times worse than the worst year over the last 30 years (1991).” North America, Brazil and Japan suffered 53.5, 24.1 and 65.2 per cent falls in Truck tyre OE demand respectively in May, with China the only market to avoid the pain – growing 2.6 per cent. Truck tyre replacement sales faired better in most markets, albeit still falling between 12.8 and 23.3 per cent in four of the five covered zones. China remained flat.
Despite the depressing figures, Deutsche Bank analysts were optimistic that the worst is over: “Since sell-out demand is not as bad, dealers destocking can’t last forever. And therefore sell-in and sell-out market trends will converge soon. Lastly, May is a relatively small month for the industry when June is much more important. For example, June represents a high 25 per cent of Michelin’s first half volumes.”
Various news reports say that at least two, maybe three – Groupe Michelin executives were aboard an Air France flight that disappeared en route from Brazil to France on Monday.
Dow Jones reports that two executives – the head of Latin American operations and a computing manager for Brazil – were on the Air France Airbus A330 that disappeared over the Atlantic just hours after taking off from Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, AFP reported that a third Michelin executive from its corporate offices in France was also on the flight.
Officials say that the flight apparently lost all electronics after hitting a sudden, unexpected storm, knocking out its communications and radar devices. Currently, search teams are scouring the Atlantic off the South American coast. (Tire Review/Akron)
Emerging tyre markets led by China are bucking the downward sales trends encountered in the European and US markets. According to Michelin’s latest market figures, Chinese passenger car replacement tyre sales have grown significantly (up a huge 31 per cent in the circumstances). At the same time Chinese truck tyre replacement market is said to be flat year-on-year, compared with massive falls in the West.
South American tyre sales, on the other hand have not faired so well. In Brazil sales of original equipment truck tyres are 30 per cent lower than last year, according to the data, which also points out that this reflects on the heavy cuts that have been made to new truck tyre production. As far as the Brazilian replacement tyre market is concerned, truck tyre sales are said to have declined approximately 20 per cent year-on-year.
According to Black Book, rumours circulating in recent months about Terry Richardson’s involvement with the 2010 Pirelli Calendar have been given some extra weight following sightings of the fashion photographer at work in Brazil. Word is that Terry is busy in Bahia with a list models that include Ana Beatriz Barros, Gracie Carvalho, Georgina Stojiljkovic and possibly also Catherine McNeil.
A picture of Richardson at work in Brazil, depicting a model resembling Catherine McNeil bareback on a white horse, has been leaked in the media. According to Black Book, for the 2010 edition of the Cal we should expect a wodge of nude models – nothing new for Richardson – provocatively posed in a pastoral setting.
During the past 25 years Evergreen Global has developed from a small Singapore based wholesaler into a well-known truck tyre supplier offering its own brands, “United”, “Global Star” and “Matrix”. The next stage in the company’s development, outlined general manager Lancy Nazareth during Tyrexpo Asia, is to establish a presence in the European market.
Since the early 1980s, when company founder Ram Niranjan Jatia moved his business – which in those days dealt exclusively with the yarn trade – from Mumbai to Singapore and entered the tyre business, Evergreen has seized the opportunity to set up branch offices in numerous global locations: Today the company’s network of offices includes sites in Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Dubai, India and Brazil.
On 3 April TMD Friction was bought out in an all equity acquisition led by its senior management team and Pamplona Capital Management, a London-based investment fund. According to a company statement, the move will safeguard approximately 3,800 jobs worldwide. Completion of the acquisition is expected by the end of April.
TMD Friction manufactures disc brake pads and drum brake linings for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, together with brake pads for racing cars, and friction materials for industrial and rail applications. TMD Friction supplies global automotive and commercial OEMs across a wide range of vehicle platforms. The company is also one of the largest suppliers to the global aftermarket with its Textar, Pagid, Mintex, Don, Cobreq, and Cosid brands. The company operates from locations across Europe, the US, Brazil, Mexico, China and Japan.
A central part of every sales and marketing strategy that is based upon premium products is the guaranteed quality of these products and a highly diversified product portfolio that addresses customer requirements. Continental has in recent times achieved some noteworthy successes in both these strategic areas through the introduction of new products from its truck tyre division, such as the “Continental HTR 2” trailer tyre. The manufacturer has brought together its entire retreading business activities under the “ContiLifeCycle” banner, including its most recent substantial developments, such as an intensified cooperation with the well-known German retreader Reifen Ihle and with the Italian Marangoni Group. All of this helps Continental to literally become a full-line supplier in the sense that it can deliver what premium customers demand: more than just new tyres that are long lasting and help save fuel – instead it delivers a full approach that helps to cut down on costs per kilometre and benefits the environment (although this typically is not the primary goal of tyre buyers). As Eckhard Wilanek, managing director of Continental’s fleet & retread business, points out, all this cannot be achieved without the help of retreading.
Like many other new tyre manufacturers, Continental has for a number of years been committed to retreading – a sector of the industry that used to have a “dirty image”, but has now become respectable. As Eckhard Wilanek says, there are primarily two key reasons why its reputation has changed in recent times. The first of these is very simple: By the time the bite of the global financial and economic recession began to be felt last autumn, fleet operators and freight forwarders were experiencing increasingly strong pressure on their bottom lines. Everybody is short of money. In these unprincely times when ‘cash is king’, economic pressures convince fleet managers that lower-priced alternatives make more sense than new tyres. So while one company will then decide to go for cheap imported tyres from the Far East (without investing into a valuable casing), another company may opt for retreading. It is important to note that the obvious advantages of retreading and the inclusion of retreads into a fleet’s tyre management makes sense at all times, whether good or bad.
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