If you were playing a word association game with a tyre executive and said “emerging markets” the chances are they would say “China.” However, while China is top of the tree when it comes to tyre production in the so-called emerging markets – and indeed the world – the recent investments of global players (such as Bridgestone and Michelin) in India, coupled with the rapid growth of the market’s domestic producers should make you sit up and take notice of what is happening in the sub-continent.

While most of the world, perhaps excluding China, was languishing under the shadow of the recent recession, India’s economy is positively booming with gross domestic product (GDP) currently growing at between 8 and 9 per cent in a global economic scenario that sees some of the world’s so-called superpowers pleased to report growth of anything more than zero and avoid the dreaded double dip. What separates India from the only other economy in the world that operates on this scale (China), is the fact that it is simultaneously growing fast, home to roughly a billion people and is also as much consumer as much as an exporter. And what’s more the very words that Apollo Tyres chairman Onkar S Kanwar and vice-chairman Neeraj Kanwar both use to describe their own staff, can also be used to optimistically sum up the population – “young, dynamic and innovative.”

Tyres & Accessories recently travelled to India to learn more about arguably the most globalised – certainly the most Europeanised – Indian tyre manufacturer, Apollo Tyres. During our whistle-stop tour of the company’s executive, R&D and production operations across India, the company demonstrated that it is moving towards its goal of becoming a global player and entering the top 10 within the next five years at a rate of knots with the news that it has joined the list of globally approved suppliers to German car marque Volkswagen. Apollo also revealed how it recently launched giant OTR tyre production at its Limda factory, truck and car radial production at its modern Chennai Greenfield plant and gave details of the construction of a new R&T (research and technology) centre at the Chennai site.