Last season’s engagement with ‘domestic treble’ winner Manchester City F.C. gave Nexen Tire abundant exposure. The tyre maker returns again in 2019/20 as an Official Partner, its fifth season with the club and its third as Sleeve Partner. The current season got underway with a 5-0 win against West Ham last Saturday.
You have to get up early to fool a Tyrepress.com reader. A couple of weeks ago we asked who could correctly identify five winter tyres with remarkably similar tread patterns – and most respondents could.
Directional or v-shaped treads offer several advantages on wet and snow-covered roads. Such patterns provide good levels of traction and also effectively remove water from the contact patch, thus offering stability and protection against aquaplaning. These characteristics make directional patterns an obvious choice for winter and all-season tyres, and it’s no surprise that the v-shaped tread is well-represented in these segments.
Nexen Tire has formed a strategic partnership with Plug and Play, the world’s largest corporate innovation platform and startup accelerator. Plug and Play was an early investor in Silicon Valley’s most renowned firms including PayPal, Lending Club, Dropbox and SoundHound. In doing so Nexen has highlighted its view of the importance of start-up thinking, future mobility, open-R&D and the Internet of Things (IoT) – all trends that the wider tyre industry is predicted to become increasingly involved in over time.
Following on from the two tyres launched last year, the N’Fera Sport and Winguard Sport 2 SUV, Nexen Tire has introduced further additions to its portfolio. The company presented the new pair, the Nexen N’Fera Primus and Nexen Roadian AT 4×4, at the Autopromotec show in Bologna this month.
Nexen Tire has a new R&D hub – the Nexen Central Research Institute, or Nexen univerCITY. Located in the Magok Industrial Complex in Seoul, South Korea, the 57,000 square metre facility will act as a research and development hub for Nexen Tire’s centres in the USA, Europe and China. More than 300 people attended an official opening ceremony for the Nexen univerCITY late last month.
The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) announced today that it has fined Kumho Tire and Nexen Tire for forcing South Korean retailers to sell tyres at or above specific set prices.
Nexen Tire Europe is due to begin trial production at its new facility in Zatec, the Czech Republic. The news marks the virtual completion of the project that started in October 2015.
South Korean tyre makers are well-represented at the iF Design Award 2019. In addition to the trio of awards that Hankook Tire will walk away with at next month’s ceremony, Nexen Tire shares that it’s Nexen N’Fera AU7 is a winner in the ‘Product’ category of this year’s awards.
Kumho Tire has been struggling appoint new company leadership after its previous chairman left following Doublestar’s purchase of the company.
The largest UK tyre wholesaler, Stapleton’s has long acknowledged the SUV/4×4 sector’s ability to transcend other segments with steady upward performance against a particularly volatile background. While a global rise in raw materials prices and post-referendum inflation are taking a toll on the UK, Stapleton’s notes the internationalism of the industry means the impact will be considerable, because where the car industry goes the tyre industry must inevitably follow.
Tyre testers have labelled all-season tyres a ‘compromise’ purchase in past years for their inability to deliver the performance of both summer and winter tyres whenever the weather snaps its fingers and demands this. In its evaluation of the current generation of all-season rubber, Germany’s auto motor und sport harbours no illusions that such a compromise still exists. It wanted to know, however, whether the compromise can be effectively reduced through considered choice of product – the answer, the publication shares, is that it can.
Nexen Tire Europe moved its head office and European technical centre to a new purpose-built 11,000 square metre location in Kelkheim, Germany on 5 September 2018.
According to the company, the Lise-Meitner-Straße site was constructed in less than 13 months, with the focus on making an ecologically friendly building and using materials sourced from local companies.
South Korean tyre maker Nexen Tire has established itself as a serious player in Europe and around the world, however after entering the top 20 of the Tyrepess.com global ‘largest companies’ list in 2016 at 19th place – an achievement driven by turnover growth over a number of years – it found itself again on the wrong side of this divider in 2017. But it will very likely return to the top 20 next time round.
Nexen Tire’s supply of original equipment tyres to Volkswagen Group models has been extended. As of this year, three Nexen tyres are being delivered to the VW plant in Pamplona, Spain for fitment on the Polo as well as to the Seat plant in Martorell, Spain, where they are mounted on the Ibiza model produced there. The tyres in question are the Nexen the N’blue HD Plus in sizes 185/65R15 88H and 215/45 R17 91 W as well as the Nexen N’Fera SU1 in size 195/55R16 91V.
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