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ROMANIA
The EVW Holding retread plant mirrors the equipment used at the Bandag Centre of Excellence in Brussels
EVW Holding’s offices in Cluj Napoca where the new plant is located
A New Bandag Dealer for Romania
With almost 21,000,000 people and approximately 120,000 commercial vehicles registered, Romania could have been an important market for retreading tyres. Due to a bad reputation from communist times, retreading has faced great difficulties in penetrating the Romanian market even if there are great advantages to be gained from the process. Despite the challenges, EVW Holding, a DAF dealer in Romania saw the opportunity and decided to invest in a new retread plant to support its customers.
opened in October 2013.
The total investment amounts to more than €1.3 million, mostly in equipment. EVW Holding, a Bridgestone dealer, chose to work with Bandag technology and Bridgestone materials. The factory in Romania has 1400 m2 and does only cold retreading for all tyre dimensions for commercial vehicles over 3.5 tonnes. Stock production started in the summer, but in August some tyres were also sold to customers.
In the first year 4000 tyres will be retreaded, the maximum capacity
products and on reducing the costs of the tyres to transporters. The first fleet that to be equipped with retreaded tyres will be group’s own fleet, which happens to be one of the biggest transport companies in Romania. The idea is that this will help in promoting the quality of the retreading process Romania.
“I think the time
to invest in a retreading business is very good, because everybody is looking for
The EVW Holding management estimates a payback time for the investment of 15 years for the construction and seven years for the equipment.
Representatives of Bandag Europe supported the installation and testing of the equipment and organised the training of the EVW Holding personnel for more than a month, from the delivery of the equipment until the production of the first series of products. The staff in Romania had six weeks training in Romania and two more in Belgium, at the Bandag Centre of Excellence.
The equipment is very professional, matching the level of equipment used at at the Bandag Centre of Excellence in Brussels. Due to the very high
level of automation, at the moment in the retreading process there are only five specialised people involved, their number being increased in the future as the capacity of production increases.
For the moment, the volume of quality cases that can be collected in Romania is still a challenge, because the transport companies have been cutting their costs by increasing the mileage they expect from the original tyres, often reducing the casings to scrap. At the same time, some of the other available retreading solutions proposed on the Romanian market don’t fulfill the customers’ expectations, so that the transport companies are not interested in protecting their casings as they do not yet see the benefits of tyre management.
EVW Holding estimates it will sell 35,000 new tyres in 2013 and the retreading business will increase the sales volume with 15 per cent.
solutions to decrease costs, and we have the capacity to offer such a solution, at a higher quality than the other products already on the market at this time”, said Gabriel Mereuta, tyre sales manager at EVW Holding.
The retreaded tyres will be through the EVW Holding network, which covers the country with the nine tyre stations, each with its own warehouse and tyre service.
This production unit is the result of a partnership between EVW Holding, and Bridgestone Bandag. “Bandag is a world leader in retreading, Bridgestone is our most important partner for truck tyres and EVW Holding is one of the most important truck tyre suppliers in Romania, so we have all the elements for a successful network”, explained Gabriel Mereuta.
sold whole
The new offer includes trucks, parts, new and retreaded tyres. Moreover, the DAF dealer is part of a group that also owns a transport company with a fleet of over 200 trucks, which has already started using the retreaded tyres. The new retreading factory is located in Cluj-Napoca, a city in the centre of Romania, and it was officially
of production being of 16,000 tyres a year. According to demand, capacity can be increased, especially when the investor analyses the export options.
The commercial team at this Bandag retreader has the goal of developing the modern concept of tyre retreading, built on the basis of the superior quality of the
50 Retreading Business