AKRON — Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd.'s (SRI) deal to buy the rights to the Dunlop brand in North America and Europe from Goodyear reunites the brand globally under a single owner for the first time in nearly a quarter century.
The eponymous brand — Scottish veterinarian and inventor John Boyd Dunlop is credited with developing in 1888 the first workable pneumatic tire — was last united under Sumitomo Rubber from the mid-1980s through 1999, when SRI and Goodyear formed a global alliance and split the rights to the Dunlop name along geographic lines.
When that alliance was dissolved in 2015, Goodyear retained the Dunlop brand rights for Europe and North America, leading SRI to double down on its Falken brand, which has become the company's primary brand in Europe and North America, its two largest geographic regions.
According to Goodyear, its sales of Dunlop-brand tires totaled $755 million in 2023 — consumer tire sales of $532 million, commercial tire sales of $201 million and specialty tire sales (excluding motorcycle) of $22 million.
That amount of additional sales revenue will push SRI toward the $8 billion revenue level and ensconce the Kobe, Japan-based company solidly as the No. 5 tire maker worldwide ahead of Pirelli & C. S.p.A.
Separately, Brand Finance, a London-based independent brand valuation and strategy consultancy, rates the Dunlop brand as the fifth most valuable brand in the tire industry, trailing Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental and Goodyear. Brand Finance assesses brands' strength through a "balanced scorecard of metrics" evaluating marketing investment, stakeholder equity and business performance.
The emergence of Sumitomo Rubber as the leading proponent of the Dunlop brand dates to 1984 and its purchase of Dunlop Holdings P.L.C., which oversaw Dunlop manufacturing entities in France, Germany and United Kingdom, but which had been teetering at that time on the brink of bankruptcy.
That deal resulted in the restoration of the Dunlop brand in the global marketplace and marked an end to the Japanese company's traditional dependency on Europe, which dated to the early 1900s when Dunlop Rubber Co. set up Japan's first modern rubber factory to produce bicycle and rickshaw tires.
During the 1960s, Sumitomo's fortunes rose in direct proportion to Dunlop's decline. In 1950, a consortium of Sumitomo group companies led by Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd. acquired a 60% equity stake in the former Dunlop Rubber Co. (Japan) Ltd.
Then in the spring of 1964, a renamed Sumitomo Rubber Industries signed a 20-year technical exchange agreement with its former British parent company.
SRI followed up its 1983 purchase of Dunlop Holdings three years later by acquiring Dunlop Tire Corp. in the U.S., which had been an independent company for a year.
At that time, the rights to the Dunlop brand were held by at least half a dozen entities covering various geographic regions in Asia/Pacific, Africa/Middle East and Latin America in addition to those held by SRI.
With these assets, and a few others, Sumitomo oversaw the commemoration in 1988 of the centennial of the debut of the first successful pneumatic tire.
Other key events affecting Dunlop brand rights include:
• December 2013 — Sumitomo Rubber acquires for $60 million Apollo Tyres South Africa Ltd. the rights to produce and sell Dunlop-brand tires in 30 African countries and two countries in the Indian Ocean region. India's Apollo Tyres Ltd. had acquired Dunlop Tyres International (Pty) Ltd. — which controlled Dunlop manufacturing assets in South Africa and Zimbabwe and rights to the brand throughout much of Africa — in 2006 in a deal worth about $62 million.
• April 2017 — Sumitomo Rubber acquires the trademark rights (for $137.5 million) to the Dunlop brand in 86 countries where it previously licensed the rights from Sports Direct International P.L.C.
