TOKYO — Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd. (YRC) is expanding the scope of the off-the-road tire plant it's building in India, budgeting an additional $171 million to more than double the factory's projected capacity.
The new investment — on top of the $165 million budgeted in September 2020 for the project — will more than double the plant's capacity to 123 tons a day by 2024 from the originally envisioned capacity of 55 metric tons a day by 2023.
The plant is under construction in the Atchutapuram Industrial Park near Visakhapatnam, India, a port city on the Bay of Bengal about 500 miles north of Chennai, which is considered an advantageous location for exporting finished products, YRC said.
The plant is on target to begin production in the first quarter of 2023, Yokohama said, at the initial targeted capacity. Capacity will then ramp up to the higher number by the first quarter of 2024.
The plant will be operated by Yokohama Off-Highway Tires (YOHT), the YRC subsidiary that combines Yokohama's off-road tires business with that of its Alliance Tire Group (ATG) subsidiary.
This will be YRC's third OTR tire plant in India. The others are in Dahej, Gujarat, and Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.
These facilities produce three of the group's core off-highway tire brands — the Alliance, Galaxy and Primex brands — which are used on agricultural, construction, industrial and forestry machinery.
With global demand for off-highway tires expanding, Yokohama Rubber recently expanded capacity at the Dahej plant and committed to building the Visakhapatnam plant.
