Serbian President Vucic helps inaugurate Toyo plant

INDJIJA, Serbia — With Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and other "distinguished" guests in attendance, Toyo Tire Corp. ceremoniously inaugurated production Dec. 14 at its $450 million passenger tire plant in Indjija.

The plant, Toyo's first in Europe and eighth worldwide, began trial production in July. A portion of the plant's 5 million unit/year capacity is earmarked for export to the U.S.

Adjacent to the factory building is a proving ground with length of just over a mile, including 0.4-mile straightaway, where Toyo said it will be able to gather on-track data on tires that can be used to verify compliance with laws/regulations and certification requirements in Europe.

This factory in Inđija — a municipality of about 47,000 inhabitants located 35 miles northwest of Belgrade in the province of Vojvodina — will be operated by Toyo Tire Serbia d.o.o., a Toyo Tire subsidiary. The company anticipates full employment will be about 580 at full capacity, which could be reached by the second half of 2023.

Toyo said the new factory features state-of-the-art technologies, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES), to visualize processes. By linking the status information of each piece of production equipment, this "smart factory" unlocks a higher dimension of production management system optimization, Toyo said.

The factory is powered in part by a solar power system, capable of generating 8.4 megawatts of power, providing 10.2 GWh of electricity output while also reducing up to 7,100 metric tons of CO2 emissions per annum..

The factory is complemented by a research and development center Toyo opened in Germany in 2019 that looks at cutting-edge raw materials, gathers the latest information on vehicles and markets, and enhances the capabilities to develop high-performance technologies at each design process of structures, shapes, and patterns.