DELAND, Fla. — Boulevard Tire Center of Deland, a longtime Bandag retread licensee, has acquired 10 GCR Tires & Service stores and one GCR retread plant in Florida and Georgia, expanding its footprint to 26 commercial tire outlets in Florida and two in Georgia.
The deal — Bridgestone Americas Inc.'s fourth disposal of GCR assets this year — closed in May and the locations have all been converted to Boulevard Tire signage. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- This story appears in the Aug. 5 print edition of Tire Business.
"This acquisition allows us the opportunity to expand our coverage to additional markets to better service our customers and grow our business, especially in the OTR and industrial segments," Boulevard Tire President Earl Colvard said in a prepared statement.
"Certainly one of the most important factors in this acquisition is the opportunity to have a large group of dedicated GCR employees join and strengthen our company," he added.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The locations sold are in: Bartow, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Ocala, Orlando, Sarasota, Tallahassee and Tampa, Fla., and Savannah and Waycross, Ga. Four of these locations — Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa — overlap with existing Boulevard Tire outlets.
Deland-based Boulevard Tire also acquired a GCR/Bandag retread plant in Clearwater, but the dealership closed that facility and consolidated its production at its existing for retread plants in Florida, Mr. Colvard said.
All told, the transaction involved 140 employees and 101 service, delivery, and OTR vehicles.
Boulevard Tire is considered the 10th largest commercial tire dealership in the U.S. with fiscal 2018 revenue of nearly $180 million and 15th largest truck tire retreader with production of over 1,000 units daily.
The company operates eight retail-focused outlets as well.
Bridgestone said selling these locations is part of its "ongoing effort to strengthen its commercial tire distribution network in the U.S."
This is the fourth tranche of GCR assets that Bridgestone has sold this year, encompassing 73 commercial service outlets and a dozen retread plants. With this divestiture, GCR's network drops to fewer than 90 locations in the U.S., down from 200-plus at the business unit's height a few years ago.
The other recent deals were:
- 13 GCR Tires & Service stores and three retread plants in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia to McCarthy Tire Service of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.;
- 46 GCR stores and six retread plants in the southern U.S. to Southern Tire Mart of Columbia, Miss.; and
- Four GCR service locations and two retread plants to Parkhouse Tire Inc. of Bell Gardens, Calif.
Bridgestone said it remains "very committed" to the GCR business, which it has owned and operated since 1988. The GCR name is derived from the names of the business' founders — Balie Griffith, Harold Crawford and Perry Rose — who opened their first location in 1945 in Odessa, Texas.
Boulevard Tire was founded in 1968 in Deland, a city of about 27,000 located about halfway betwee Orlando and Daytona Beach.