The Yokohama Tire plant in Salem will expand considerably.^Yokohama Tire Corporation (YTC) announced today that it is expanding operations at its Salem manufacturing plant because of increasing demand for its consumer and light truck tires.
The $13 million project will include new tire-making machinery, upgrading and modifying existing machines and an increase in high-performance and light truck tire manufacturing flexibility. The expansion is to be completed by August 2011.
“We have seen strong demand and our increase is well above the industry average,” says Dan King, Yokohama vice president, sales and marketing. “We have gained more allocation from our offshore plants, but it is not enough. That’s why the expansion at Salem will help fill the pipeline with our popular consumer tires, as well as light truck tires.”
King says the strong demand for Yokohama tires is across the board. In June, for instance, YTC’s parent company in Japan announced a third-term expansion in its Thailand plant. The investment will cost 9.7 billion yen ($117 million) and will increase the plant’s capacity to produce passenger car and light truck tires by 1.4 million units. This will expand the plant’s overall output to four million tires annually.
The Thailand plant has been producing passenger car and light truck tires since 2006, and tires for trucks and buses since April 2005.
“The plant expansions are a strategic initiative aimed at ensuring that our product supply is in step with the market demand,” says King. “The investments are a reinforcement of Yokohama’s commitment to the consumers and our dealer network.”
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