Tokyo - Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd., announced today that it is building a new passenger car tyre production facility on land adjacent to an existing truck/bus tyre plant of its Chinese subsidiary Suzhou Yokohama Tire Co., Ltd., in Jiangsu Province. Construction of the new facility began in summer 2013, and it is expected to begin production in April 2014, with annual capacity to be gradually expanded until it reaches 6 million tyres by the end of 2017. The total investment is expected to reach about 26.5 billion yen. The facility will primarily manufacture YOKOHAMA’s eco tyre brand "BluEarth” and other high-performance, fuel-efficient passenger car tyres, for which demand has been increasing in recent years. The products will be sold in China. The plant’s high-performance tyres will be targeted at original equipment sales to automobile makers in China as well as the aftermarket for replacement tyres.
Suzhou Yokohama Tire Co., Ltd. was established in 2006 as a manufacturing and sales company specializing in truck/bus tyres. It currently has an annual production capacity of 340,000 tyres. Another YOKOHAMA subsidiary, Hangzhou Yokohama Tire Co., Ltd., is specializing in the production of passenger car tyres at its plant in Zhejiang Province. The Hangzhou subsidiary was established in 2001 and raised its annual capacity to 5.1 million tyres through four capacity expansions, which concluded in 2011.
YOKOHAMA´s expansion of its tyre production capacity in China is one of the measures set forth in Phase III (2012–2014) of its “GD100” medium-term management plan. During Phase III, YOKOHAMA plans to boost its total global annual production capacity by 7 million tyres.