Linglong to build new site and mulls another two

Yantai, China – Linglong Tyre announced in February its plan to build a fourth China site with nearly 14.5 million unit total annual capacity.

Such annual capacity includes 12 million passenger car tires, 2.4 million truck and bus tires and 60,000 engineering tires. The plant also has 1.5 million-unit annual capacity for inner tubes and flaps and 3,000 tonne annual capacity for plastics pads.

“The company’s production and sales volume…is expected to grow at a 20% yearly rate in the future,” said Linglong’s announcement. “Our radial tire facilities have been running at high capacity utilization rate…but it’s hard to meet the demand.”

Located in Jingmen, Hubei province, an emerging hub for China’s new energy vehicle sector, the new plant has 1 million square metre total area and is scheduled to break ground in May 2018. Construction of the project will take three years.

“[The project] will be built in line with smart manufacturing standards,” said the announcement.

The company will pump €742 million (5.8 billion yuan) into the plant and expects it to generate €55 million annual net profit on €645 million revenue when on stream.

Linglong currently has three China sites in Guangxi province’s Liuzhou and Shandong province’s Yantai and Dezhou. It also opened an overseas site in Thailand.

Besides the new site in Jingmen, the company also plans for one additional site in China and two overseas in Europe and the US, adding up to eight sites globally...

Full details of this report in the March/April issue of European Rubber Journal magazine