Tire manufacturer Yokohama Rubber has announced that it will consolidate its various off-highway businesses into a single entity. The merger will include Alliance Tire Group (ATG), which Yokohama bought four years ago, and the company’s other off-the-road (OTR) tire businesses across the globe.
According to the company, the new entity, named Yokohama Off-Highway Tires, will have a global footprint with a leadership team distributed between Tokyo, Boston, Amsterdam and Mumbai. Yokohama notes that its current medium-term management plan, the Grand Design 2020 (GD2020) includes a commercial tire strategy that targets ‘Positioning commercial tires as a pillar of growth in our second century and off-highway tires as a growth driver’.
The company hopes that the exercise will help it remain cost-competitive in the market, with the unified business offering the full range of off-highway tires, from small forklift tires to ultra-large ROTR (radial off-the-road) tires. As the first step in the consolidation process, Yokohama Rubber’s OTR tire business in the USA will be combined with Alliance Tire Americas Inc. (ATA) on January 1, 2021. The combined entity will be called Yokohama Off-Highway Tires America. Integration plans for the rest of the world are still to be finalized.
