ERJ: Rubber & Tire industry in numbers

Review of the key figures and data to emerge this week from leading players in the tire & industry:

Projects & investments

China's Jiangsu General Science Technology Co. has dropped plans to build a €200m JV tire plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. The project was designed to have the capacity to produce 1.3m radial tires per year, including 1.2m truck & bus tires, and 100k units of off-road tires.

Jiangsu General Science Technology Co. also unveiled a Yuan1.5bn (€191m) plan to expand its new factory in Cambodia. The 18-month project will add annual capacity for 3.5m units of PCRs and 750k TBRs at the plant, inaugurated in April 2023. Once completed, the site in Sihanoukville Port Special Economic Zone will have total capacity to produce 8.5m PCRs and 1.6m TBR tires per year.

In Vietnam, Chinese tire maker Jinyu Tire Group has broken ground on a project to add passenger car and light truck tire production at its facility in Tay Ninh province by 2025. The project is an expansion of Jinyu (Vietnam) Tire Co. which started production in 2021 and has the capacity to manufacture 2m TBRs a year.

Kolon Industries Inc. has doubled production capacity for ‘super fibre’ aramid production as its manufacturing site in Gumi, in central South Korea. The group invested around KRW300bn (€208m) in the facility, raising production capacity to 15,300 tonnes per annum,

JK Tyre has raised funds of INR5 billion (€55 million) via a 'qualified institutional placement'. The Indian tire maker will use the QIP funds for the purposes of growth capex and strengthening its balance sheet.

Gloves market

For the three months to 30 Nov 2023, Top Glove said it delivered a 4% quarter-on-quarter growth in sales to RM493m (€97m), while narrowing loss from operations by 39% sequentially to RM60m. Sales were, however, down 22% compared to the RM632m reported for the same period last year. Loss after tax improved 90% sequentially and 70% year-on-year to RM47m.

Share prices

Development of leading rubber processors’ shares

Materials prices

Synthetic rubber

Synthetic rubber pricing* depicted a mixed picture over the trading week ended 8 Dec, the latest data compiled by ChemAnalyst shows. (See table above)

Natural rubber

Rubber futures prices

Natural rubber (NR) futures concluded the first trading week of 2024 with a slight downturn across most major exchanges, according to Japan Exchange Group (JPX).

Selected NR futures price trends on major trading exchanges

Global NR market trends

ANRPC projected NR consumption to reach 15.438m tonnes in 2023, slightly down from the prior-year 15.511m tonnes. Demand from non-ANRPC members is expected to fall 11.1% year-on-year to 4.113m tonnes and their share of global NR demand to drop below 30%, the lowest share to date. Demand from NR producer countries is set to grow in 2023: China up 3.7% year-on-year to 6.722m tonnes; Thailand up 1.0% to 1.592m tonnes; and India up 5.7% to 1.400m tonnes. By contrast, Malaysia and Sri Lanka are projected to see year-on-year declines of 20% and 24% respectively in 2023.

ANRPC upgraded its forecast for NR production in 2023, now predicting a 3.5% year-on-year rise in to 15.145m – 1.5% higher than its previous forecast. The upgrade was linked to to “better-than-expected" production in emerging non-ANRPC member countries, most notably Cote d’Ivoire.