Apollo Tyres Ltd is to set up a joint venture in China, according to Beijing Auto chairman Xu Heyi. The proposed venture will have an annual production capacity of about 1 million tires, Xu said in Beijing, where he was attending the National People’s Congress. The factory will be built in the city of Huanghua in Hebei, the northern province that surrounds Beijing, and will be Beijing Auto’s first joint venture to produce tires. The agreement would give Apollo an entry into China after its buyout in 2013 of Ohio-based Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. was sunk by opposition from Cooper’s Chinese tire-manufacturing partner. Officials of the Chinese affiliate, Chengshan Cooper Tires, seized control of the facility and refused to produce tires, release records or allow US officials to tour the plant, according to court filings. “Apollo has an ambition of being one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world and so entering China is important,” said Deepesh Rathore, director at Emerging Markets Automotive Advisors in Delhi. “They earlier tried to enter China with Cooper and that fell through so it’s a good opportunity to enter the Chinese market with an established player.” Shares of Apollo rose as much as 1.6 percent and traded at Rs.175.25 as of 11:13am in Mumbai trading, compared with a 0.1% gain in the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex Index. Rohit Sharan, a spokesman for Apollo, could not immediately comment on plans for a China joint venture when reached by phone in New Delhi. China production Apollo will join South Korea’s Hankook Tire Co. and Japan’s Bridgestone Corp. among Asian tiremakers with production in China, the world’s largest auto market. Annual tire production has risen fourfold in the past decade to 941.2 million units in 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. Apollo announced in June 2013 that it would take over Cooper Tire for $2.5 billion. Within weeks of the deal announcement, the workers at Cooper’s joint venture plant in China went on strike in opposition of the Apollo purchase.