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NEW ORLEANS REVIEW
According to Corbi, “The retread market is adversely affected with the import of Chinese new tyres as they are competitively priced at the level of retreaded casings.”
With the casing business reduced to almost a fifth of the earlier volume, it has changed the strategy required to remain profitable in the business. The firm has therefore started the distribution of low cost Chinese tyre brand in the Uruguay market. “We have started importing a small Chinese truck tyre brand ‘Xbri’ and selling around 600-700 tyres in the Uruguay market,” Antonio Corbi said.
Reco Puma’s Montevideo plant retreads around 2,000 tyres in a
month in the peak crop sowing season. But in October and November, production came down to 1,500 tyres per month.
Uruguay is a small country with the capital Montevideo home to nearly half of the country’s population. “Around 9,000 tyres are retreaded every month in Uruguay and we control almost 22 per cent share in the country’s retreading market,” said Corbi.
The company uses the Tipler brand of tread rubber from Brazil and operates the plant on largely Brazilian equipment. “We buy around 22 tonnes of tread rubber from Brazil every month,” he informed.
system.
As part of its campaign the tyre major has now openedthree company owned stores across the USA. The most recent of these was in Taylor Michigan, this joined stores already operating in Tolleson, Arizona, and Memphis, Tennessee.
The stores are specifically targeting key account holders and will support the new tyre sales operations, offer retread services, maintenance and tyre management programmes. As with Conti’s operations elsewhere these are all branded as BestDrive outlets.
“The market demands that if you’re going to sell new tyres to the large key fleets, you’re going to have to be in the retread business as well,” BestDrive Managing Director Clif Armstrong said. “BestDrive is a route to market for Continental and the ContiTread product. It gives us another point of light for that option in the marketplace.” Armstrong admitted that opening company-owned Best Drive outlets was not their main goal, but that it would consider doing so as a last resort if there were corporate demand from the fleet market in any given area.
“Our first hope is that we find independent dealers to convert,” Armstrong said. “We would certainly like to have dealers become a part of our ContiTread network, but there are certain fleets in certain markets where we don’t have a conversion that tell us that they want to buy new Conti tyres and Conti retreads.” In 2011, CTA introduced ContiLifeCycle, a retread product designed to be “a complete seamless solution for fleets that offers a full product and service suite from Continental,” Paul Williams, executive vice president of Continental’s commercial truck tyre business unit, said. In the
time since then, Conti has signed 16 ContiLifeCycle licensees: 15 operate in the U.S., one operates in Canada.
The strategy for expansion includes a mix of ContiLifeCycle centres and Best Drive outlets designed to service key fleets in the Americas.
“All of this is so we have the ability to service key fleets in U.S., Canada and Mexico,” Armstrong said. “BestDrive and the conversion option for independent tyre dealers is just the next step. You invest in your product, you invest in your people and now you have to invest in your points of light.” “Each store is a separate profit centre for Best Drive LLC,” Armstrong said. “Everything we do flows through Continental. We create budgets, sales forecasts, P&O and work through all of the financial tools as an independent.”
“What we’ve done with these three locations is we’ve found an existing building, retrofitted it to our needs and opened it as a commercial tyre dealership,” Armstrong said. “You can be a lot quicker to market that way.” Desp[ite not being newcomers to the business of tyre ales, CTA have been on a steep learning curve since the first store in phoenix opened.
“Quite frankly, we didn’t know what we were doing,” Armstrong said. “But, we grew, we learned. We did a lot of tried and tested processes. We wanted to make sure that the retread process was sellable to conversion of our independent dealer base.”
The Phoenix operation is split, with the retread shop being located inside a state penitentiary where inmates not only retread tyres to earn some money, they also learn a useful skill that they can use when they have served their sentence.
Goodyear to Further Expand Unicircle Range in 2015
Goodyear has announced that it will be extending its Unicircle range of retreaded tyres in the US market during the course of 2015. “We are launching a number of new products under the Unicircle range this year,” said Todd Labbe, GM, Commercial Retread, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company at the New Orleans Tire & Retread Expo. “The range will offer low rolling resistance and therefore help improve fuel efficiency levels,” he added.
Goodyear’s Unicircle technology features a continuous ring with a seamless construction that matches
the shape of the casing. The spliceless range continue to be a popular range from Goodyear in the US market. Unicircle launched around three decades ago, the product attaining global footprints with markets US, Canada & Europe.
In addition Goodyear has recently extended its KMax range of mileage-oriented truck tyres with the addition of several retreaded products. New arrivals include a pair of KMax sizes in the TreadMax mould cure line-up and two pre- cure treads for Goodyear’s UniCircle portfolio.
Todd Labbe, GM, Commercial Retread, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.
Conti Expanding Retread Business with Company-Owned Stores
Continental Tire the Americas is working to make up ground on the US market. The company is hoping to develop its fleet business across the USA but desperately needs to back up its new tyre sales operations with a
56 Retreading Business
whole life cost package that includes retreading.
With the North American retread sector increasingly polarised towards the big players, Conti has its work cut out for it in converting retreaders to the Conti