WEIHAI, China — Triangle Tire Co. Ltd. has scrapped a project to build a passenger and truck tire plant in the U.S. due to "a change in investment environment."
In a Chinese-language filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange on May 13, the tire maker said its board of directors had agreed on the withdrawal from the $580 million project in Edgecombe, N.C.
Announced in November 2017, the project was expected to be completed in five years and ultimately produce up to 6 million tires a year, comprising 5 million passenger and light truck tires and 1 million truck tires.
The company got as far as clearing ground at the 1,449-acre site in Edgecombe County by mid-2018. Since then the company referred to the plant's progress as "stalled" on a number of occasions.
Triangle said the investment environment had changed over the recent years in the U.S. and factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to affect the project.
"The construction of the project constituted an obstacle and the project could not proceed normally," the company statement said.
As a result, in order to optimize resource allocation and reduce investment risk, the company and the Edgecombe County government decided to terminate the project amicably.
Triangle Tyre is considered the 21st largest tire manufacturer worldwide with fiscal 2020 sales of $1.26 billion, according to Tire Business research. Its U.S. headquarters, in Franklin, Tenn., opened in 2016.
Triangle Tire USA officials were not immediately available for comment.
The demise of this project is the third proposed U.S. tire plant to be scuttled in the past four years. Others are;
- Qingdao Sentury Tire Co. Ltd. — which sells tires under the Delinte, Groundspeed, Landsail and Sentury brand names — declared its plans for a U.S. plant "on hold indefinitely" in 2019, three years after disclosing plans to invest $530 million to build a plant in Troup County, Ga., capable of producing 12 million car and light truck tires a year.
- Guangzhou Vanlead Group Co. Ltd. — a China state-owned entity that controls Wanli Tire Group — pulled the plug in mid-2018 on plans it had announced a year earlier to invest $1 billion in a consumer tire plant in South Carolina, capable of producing 6 million tires annually.
- Balkrishna Industries Ltd. (BKT) suspended in August 2019 a $100 million plan for a U.S. off-highway tire factory it had disclosed the previous October, citing "business uncertainties" related to difficult macroeconomics and the "volatile" climate conditions.
