Continental Tire the Americas commercial vehicle tire unit kicked off its annual meeting today in Florida with an exciting announcement regarding its ContiLifeCycle retreading solution. In the opening discussion, Paul Williams, executive vice president for truck tires in the Americas, broke the news that Continental has made a significant investment in its tread rubber plant in central Mexico.
“We first opened the ContiLifeCycle tread rubber manufacturing plant in May 2011 with the intent of supplying our ContiLifeCycle retread licensees and company-owned plants throughout our current footprint of the U.S., Mexico and the Andean region, and expanding in the near future to include the Mercosur countries.
“Due to overwhelming demand, today I am happy to announce a multi-million dollar investment at this central location, which is occurring more than a year earlier than anticipated,” Williams said to a crowd of more than 150 dealers from throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The investment, Williams said, includes a capacity increase by adding an additional curing and finishing line, and doubles the size of the manufacturing facility to allow for additional space for both raw materials and work in progress. The facility will have a footprint of more than 4,000 square meters space. Production of Continental’s ContiTread flat treads has been tripled, he said.
“This expansion allows us to accommodate the growing need for retreaded truck tires in our current markets, and to comfortably expand as we reach even further across the Americas. The result is that Continental now has the ability to cap more than 1.2 million truck tires annually with our ContiTreads. An additional expansion has already been planned for 2014, which involves yet another curing and finishing line to be installed,” Williams said.
Williams attributes the skyrocketing growth of the ContiLifeCycle business to the need for fleets in the Americas to have an economical lifetime truck tire solution, and also to the high level of interest from dealers in each country.
