China’s tire industry is in melt-down. The question now is, how long can the current situation last? I’ve just come back from Shandong Province and the mood is not good. When things are not going well, Chinese people will rarely tell you the real situation. When they tell you things are bad, you know the
Disruption. Change. Revolution. Usually when we talk about the tire industry, we talk about incremental change. Tires are safety critical and big changes introduce too much risk. Vehicle makers, tire retailers and the vehicle operators like tires to be reliable, safe and secure. Tire manufacture is both capital-intensive and labour-intensive. This means tire makers need
The following letter was written by Jan Prins, who is in charge of Tyre CAE & Modelling at Jaguar Land Rover. He has agreed to let me share it with you. Would you be interested in joining a fairly informal (private / co-opted) ‘network’ for discussions on tyre testing and tyre modelling? Those of you
Last week I spent a lot of time with the VDI at their meeting in Hanover. For those who don’t know, the VDI – The German Association of Engineers – is a highly prestigious organisation which links many industries. For our industry, it was one of the few forums in 2015 where tire engineers employed
We’re putting together the programme for the Tire Technology Conference next year in Hanover. It’s exciting, pulling together 140 or so papers detailing the latest technological advances in this industry. A lot of things in this industry are incremental, so we have papers on a huge range of topics. Many of these have an element
At the Frankfurt IAA motor show yesterday, two major themes emerged from my conversations with tire makers: New European legislation on TPMS is pushing tire makers to develop super-charged All-Season tires for European markets Global legislation on fuel economy means car makers are setting extreme targets for tire rolling resistance EU market moving toward All-Season
At a meeting in Yancheng, China this week, over 100 tire industry experts assembled to discuss the programme for introducing consumer labels for Chinese tires. 2016 will be a voluntary preparation period. 2017 will see the first voluntary labels associated with tires by leading brands 2018 the government will publish lists to say which tires
Today’s announcement that Yokohama and Nippon Zeon have successfully made isoprene monomer from micro-organisms set me thinking about bio-tech in the rubber industry. I first reported on the use of micro-organisms to make isoprene back in 2008 when Goodyear announced its cooperation with Genencor. Genencor subsequently became part of DuPont. Since then, Goodyear has gone
This week, I want to alert you to something from under the radar: there are big changes going on in the retread sector around the world. It’s hard to get numbers on this, but I’m increasingly getting involved in conversations about the impact of imports of low-priced truck tires from China on the global retread
Downward. Natural rubber (NR) is in mid- to long-term structural over-capacity right now, and the situation is made worse by the short- to mid-term turmoil in China’s tire industry. I’m not saying anything new here. The trade has been awash with speculation about how far down the price of rubber can go for the last
A weekly newsletter of developments in the China tire industry including news reports and David Shaw’s expert commentary and analysis.
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