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HUNGARY
would be recognisable as a tyre depot anywhere in Europe, a large building with drive in work areas, offices to one side and a warehouse come retread shop to the rear.
The plant in use at Schlosser Gumi was all purchased from Kraiburg, and includes a Marangoni ITT-3000 shearography machine and a Marangoni Rasp 1500 buffer.
The company uses a range of treads, including Goodyear, as Schlosser is a Goodyear dealer, and they want the company to offer Goodyear treads. However, alongside Goodyear there are some Kraiburg treads in use for premium brands, but the bulk of treads used today are from Hules Banda.
Lakatos says, “The Chinese tyres have driven the prices down and we have to remain as competitive as we can be with as good a quality tread as we can offer. Initially, we had some challenges with Bandamatic tread but they very quickly responded and resolved the issues.” The Lakatos family became involved with retreading back in 1990 when they opened a Bandag retread shop. In a short time they had become the biggest retread shop in Hungary and a second Bandag plant was opened in 1997.
This co-operation with Bandag continued but as time passed Schlosser started working with Marangoni and eventually Bandag pulled the plug and the two plants were closed. By 2004 it was decided to open a new retread plant and that was when the new partnership with Marangoni and Kraiburg came about.
Over the years there have been several suppliers, including Galgo but today the main supplier is Hules Banda.
“The business is under pressure now,” says Lakatos, “In 2013 we were producing 11,000 pieces, in 2014 that became 10,000 and for 2015 we are doing 600 per month, and that used to be over 1,000 per month. We really need to reach 8,000 retreads this year. The challenges at the moment are technical or staff related as much as
anything else.” At the time of our visit to Schlosser Gumi the main autoclave was playing up and production had been halted. “It is difficult to find and retain good staff with the right experience,” added Lakatos. “They do have other options in this region, and young people don’t want this type of work.”
Schlosser has another tyre outlet in Szeged in the south of the country and a second “mothballed” retread plant that it could put back to work if there were the demand.
The main customers are Schwartzmüller, Coca Cola, and local bus companies. Schlosser makes no sales through any other retailer or wholesaler, everything is controlled from the headquarters at Dunaharaszti. Schwartzmüller, in particular, is a growing contract and Schlosser is fitting some 120 tyres daily on their trailers produced in Hungary. This is a contract that requires only premium tyres, but it helps give Schlosser Gumi a backbone from which to expand. Lakatos is no different from any of the other Hungarian retreaders that we met with. Chinese tyres are a challenge. He can’t compete on price and they are taking market share. However, the long term prognosis is that customers are finding that buying these tyres is actually a poor economic choice as they don’t have the service life, and they can be dangerous. The same arguments that everyone else has given.
On the casings issue, once again, only Hungarian sourced casings are used and since much of the business is with fleets there is an increasing level of CoC business. There were issues with Super singles, but that has resolved itself. Lakatos closed with an upbeat comment. “In the last four weeks we have actually seen an increase in demand, and hopefully we can increase production to meet that demand, if we can find the staff and retain them as a skilled workforce.”
Refit Abronics is a family owned Recamic plant at Dabas, south- west of Budapest. The business started in 1984 with a small retread plant and a single service station plus a mobile tyre fitting unit.
At the time, pre-revolution, the Hungarian vehicle fleet was old, and there were only a few opportunities for servicing the market. However, that changed in 1989, and the Béres family were in a good position to build a business in the developing Hungarian market.
A bigger service station in Dabas was acquired, and the current tyre warehouse and retread plant was built in 1997. By now the
equipment and Refit Abroncs bought the equipment that had only been installed at Taurus in 1998, and started working on their own retreads as a Remix retreader. A recent addition to the production line at Refit Abroncs is a Steinbichler INTACT shearography machine, introduced to ensure quality and reduce the claim rate even further.
Gérgo Béres, the second generation of the Béres family involved in the business, explained how the company operated. “80 per cent of our business is with premium brands, and that is why we have stuck with Michelin. The Michelin sales team are supposed to sell Remix alongside Recamic, and we
Refit Abronics Going with Michelin
Gérgo Béres is responsible for the running of the Recamic operation at Refit Abroncs
company was servicing the truck and agricultural tyre market as a speciality.
In 2005 as a development of the truck service operations Refit Abroncs started retreading. This was around the time when Michelin bought the Taurus plant and divested it of some of its operations. Michelin was only interested in hot cure Recamic, so they sold off the cold cure
should see a benefit from that team support. In reality the sales reps want to sell Recamic as their retread option and we get very little from that side of the partnership. So, we have our own team going out selling direct to fleets.
“We take our tyres in, and we run tests with the fleet customers. We do comparative testing,and when they can see the difference, we get
The Steinbichler INTACT shearography machine is the latest investment at Refit Abroncs
36 Retreading Business