Taiwanese tyre manufacturer Maxxis Group (Maxxis) is planning to build at least five factories in India as it expects the country to play a significant part in its chase to become a global player by 2025, alongside Indonesia. Maxxis is investing US$ 400 million on its manufacturing plant in Sanand, Gujarat – its phase I expansion aims to hike output to 60,000 units of two-wheeler tyres/day from the current 20,000 units/day.
According to Maxxis India Marketing Head Bing-Lin Wu, the company plans to focus on two major two-wheeler markets in the world – India and Indonesia – in achieving the group goal by 2025: officials have estimated that a certain output from the Indian market alone will achieve that target and will soon discuss investments and such for setting up production units.
However, the investments on the new plants will be comparably lesser than on the Sanand plant. Maxxis has already made “some heavy advanced investments” on machinery at Sanand, for processes such as mixing, vulcanising and calendaring –Wu said the “capacity of one machine is so huge that it can supply six to seven production lines.”
The Sanand plant expansion may also see half the land received from the Gujarat government used for four-wheeler tyre production, in addition to its 60,000 unit two-wheeler capacity, if Maxxis achieves its target of garnering 15% of the two-wheeler tyre market share in India by 2023.
Commenting on the four-wheeler tyre segment, Wu said the group’s 2025 expectations were largely pinned on both two and four-wheeler tyres segment in India; although he admits that “two-wheeler tyres in India has more advantage than four-wheeler tyre business.”
Wu added that Maxxis expects to continue with its growth momentum from last year into 2020, despite the automobile industry suffering a downturn: “I say we are still in a position to aim at high growth, given that we are going to have even greater shares in the existing partnership and are looking at multiple projects simultaneously with original equipment partners.”
Part of the world’s 9th largest tyre brand , which clocked revenue of around US$ 4 billion in 2019 and accomplished much in international markets, Maxxis India currently supplies two-wheeler tyres to Honda, Hero MotoCorp, Yamaha and Suzuki from its Sanand plant, and four-wheeler tyres to Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki and Jeep.