Yokohama Rubber Co. on Friday said it will invest an additional $82 million to expand passenger car tyre manufacturing capacity up to 4.5 million units next year to meet the increasing demand in the local market.
The additional capacity will be installed within the company's Visakhapatnam plant. The new line is scheduled to start production in the fourth quarter of 2024 and will be capable of building passenger car tyres of up to 22 inches, it said.
Yokohama Rubber's Indian subsidiary Yokohama India Pvt. Ltd. has the annual capacity to produce 2.8 million tyres from its facility at Bahadurgarh in Haryana.
Besides, Yokohama Rubber has three production facilities for off-highway tyres, one each at Tirunelveli (Tamil Nadu), Dahej (Gujarat) and Visakhpatnam (Andhra Pradesh).
The total production capacity of the three plants together stands at 297 tonnes (total rubber weight) per day, as per the company.
"With an additional investment of $82 million, the company (Yokohama Rubber Co.) looks to increase its annual passenger car tyre production capacity in India with Yokohama India Pvt. Ltd. from the current 2.8 million to 4.5 million tyres," it said.
YIN has been in operation since 2007.
India's automobile industry, Yokohama Rubber said, has been expanding rapidly, with its total automobile sales volume in 2022 surpassing that of Japan, making India the third largest automobile market in the world.
Yokohama Rubber expects this growth to continue in the future, it said and added that to support this growth, the company has steadily expanded YIN's annual production capacity—from an initial 7,00,000 tyres in 2014 to 2.8 million in January this year.
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