Stapleton’s (Tyre Services) Ltd has joined the International Tyre Manufacturers’ Association (ITMA). According to the association, Stapleton’s joins ITMA “following the recent addition of an Asian tyre brand to its portfolio”. ITMA now has 23 members, nine of which appear in Tyres & Accessories’ top 20 leading tyre manufacturers ranking.
European Tyre Enterprise Ltd (ETEL), which includes Kwik Fit GB and Stapleton’s Tyre Services, has announced that Shinjiro Tanaka will replace current Group CEO Yasuyuki Harada, who is returning to Japan.
Mopar, Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA)’s spares, parts and service operation, has announced that it will be selling its products online on Amazon Marketplace. Mopar will be the first Automaker in Italy to sell its products through this platform. According to the company, it is a new way to respond to the needs of increasingly more technological and digitised customers.
What brand of tyres does a tyre distributor use on its own fleet? In the case of Stapleton’s Tyre Services, the answer is Michelin. The company began trialling Michelin Agilis CrossClimate tyres across 25 Renault Master vans in March, and determined it could be clocking up an extra 20,000 miles per set compared to its existing policy.
Roy Croft, who was managing director of Stapleton’s for most of the second half of the twentieth century, died with family at his side at the age of 89 on Sunday 7 October following a short battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Jean.
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.
The winners of the 2018 “Tyre Industry Oscars” have been announced at the 89th National Tyre Distributors Association annual dinner, with a Bridgestone double in the tyre manufacturer and staff training and development categories headlining the event. More awards were added this year for excellence in tyre retail, with small, medium, and large business categories, as well as an overall winner. Presenting was television personality Mark Durden-Smith, who injected welcome energy and humour into procedings. Tyrepress also announced the results live via its Twitter feed.
Nearly 20 years after Stapleton’s introduced the ProfitLink ecommerce system, the company is rolling out an upgraded version along with the latest edition of TyreSurf. The news follows an earlier ProfitLink overhaul just a few years ago, with the introduction of the retail mark ups system. In addition, Stapleton’s made an announcement in May this year, when Stapleton’s Wholesale director Nigel O’Hara revealed that the market could expect a new edition of ProfitLink.
Stapleton’s wholesale director Nigel O’Hara states that it has built its high performance tyre range to fit in with the somewhat counter-intuitive growth of the sector in turbulent macro-economic times.
Over the last year or so it has been broadly noted that the SUV/4×4 sector of the tyre market has been impressively resilient. Not just from the relatively local impact of the UK’s Brexit vote and resulting inflation and slump in certain motor vehicle sectors (in the UK at least). The tyre industry’s also been faced with escalating raw materials costs at a global level.
As our September 2017 article “Strong growth continues in 4×4/SUV tyre market”, sales of new SUVs exceeded 6 million units in 2017, up from fewer than 4 million five years before, with further growth projected to produce regional sales at 8 million new SUVs in 2022. The reason? “The SUV/4×4 tyre market is, of course, following suit: in Europe (including Turkey), ETRMA Europool data projects sales of 18 million in 2017.”
Back in July 2016 a survey of tyre tread depth when brought in for replacement by safety organisation TyreSafe in collaboration with Highways England produced disturbing results. Of nearly 102,000 tyres checked from 810 British retailers almost a quarter were illegal for road use – the equivalent of 10 million potentially dangerous tyres. More worrying was the report that there’s an upward trend in the percentage of tyres with illegal tread depths on replacement (66% percent in 2015 and 70% in 2016). TyreSafe’s alarming prediction was that ‘higher numbers of dangerous and illegal tyres will be driven on the UK’s road’s in 2017’.
Leading UK tyre group, European Tyre Enterprise Ltd (ETEL), has announced a series of promotions within its senior management, including the appointment of a new CEO following Kenji Murai’s promotion to a global position with parent company, Itochu.
When it became a legal requirement for all new vehicles produced and sold in Europe to be fitted with TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring System) back in November 2014 the concept was still unfamiliar to the majority of motorists. In the main it was drivers of early adopter, generally high-end, marques such as BMW and Mercedes who got the benefits in terms of enhanced safety, tyre life and fuel economy. Indeed, even three years ago those manufacturers had been fitting TPMS as standard for more than two decades.
This year Stapleton’s celebrates 80 years since Sydney Stapleton set up his business in a simple parade of shops at 195 High Street, Watford in 1937. An entrepreneur of terrific dynamism and foresight, he was among the few to spot and take advantage of the fast-growing market for tyres. A decade on, in the post WWII years, the company’s total weekly wage bill amounted to the princely sum of £20. It’s safe to say in this 80th anniversary year the wage bill’s grown considerably now Stapleton’s employs some 1,100 staff at eight regional sales offices and eleven distribution hubs nationwide. It’s also safe to suggest that Sydney Stapleton would be staggered by the scale of his old business, with a current stock capacity of 1.5 million tyres available at any given time.
When Sydney Stapleton set up his business in a simple shop parade at 195 High Street, Watford in 1937 he was one of a number of businessmen taking advantage of the growing market for tyres. Growing his business through the 1950s and ‘60s, his personal renown as one of the industry’s most dynamic characters and an entrepreneur of considerable foresight followed. The location of its headquarters in the vicinity of the M1 is testament to this – in the 1960s Stapleton’s supplied replacement earthmover tyres used to build the Watford-Milton Keynes stretch of the motorway.
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