Alliance Tyre Group (ATG), a Yokohama group company, has announced that it will build a new plant in India’s Special Projects Zone, Atchutapuram Industrial Park, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, for the purpose of expanding production capacity. The new plant will have a daily production capacity of 55 tons (rubber weight) with planned capital investment totalling $165 million. Construction will start in the third quarter of 2020, and the new plant is scheduled to come on line in the first quarter of 2023.
Nitin Mantri, Director, ATG, said: “Yokohama’s management plan – the Grand Design 2020 (GD2020) includes a commercial tyre strategy that targets off-highway tyres as a growth driver. With increasing demand for our products in global markets, this decision comes at an opportune time.”
The Atchutapuram Industrial Park in Andhra Pradesh is near the port of Visakhapatnam, which makes it an advantageous location for exporting finished products. The plant’s site has a total area of about 320,000 sq. m. which provides plenty of room for future expansion.
ATG currently has two tyre plants in India – one at Dahej in Gujarat and another at Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. The plants produce all three of ATG’s core off-highway tyre brands – ALLIANCE, GALAXY and PRIMEX – which are used on agricultural, construction, industrial and forestry machinery. With global demand expanding, Yokohama Rubber launched a project to expand the capacity of its existing line at ATG’s Dahej plant in February 2018. Upon the project’s completion, capacity has been increased 1.6-fold. However, expectations for further increases in demand for ATG’s off-highway tyres led to the decision to build an entirely new plant.
The new plant in India will expand the Yokohama Group’s global off-highway tyre production network to eight plants in four countries, including three in India, one in Israel, one in Vietnam, and three in Japan. The global off-highway tyre daily production capacity of the Yokohama Group will now increase to 480 tons (rubber weight). Going forward, the group will continue to strengthen its global competitiveness in the off-highway tyre sector.