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that the company is not retreading tyres there, but only sells stock retreads.
Speaking about the current situation, Kari Oksanen admitted that the company will need to
replace old machinery at the factory with some new equipment, and in this regard investment must be allocated within the coming years. However, the investment programme has not been
Green Tread Will Not Give up on Retreading Industry
determined and approved yet, and the company is waiting to see how the situation with the impact of Chinese tyres will evolve. In terms of equipment, KL-Rengas currently relies on basic precure equipment, applying manual buffing instead of automatic buffing.
On the subject of optimisation, Kari Oksanen stated that, in recent years, the company has introduced some changes to the stock planning scheme and paperwork at the
facility. In the first case, he informed, KL-Rengas has recently made some basic improvements, including in terms of raw materials stock and finished retreads stocks. In the second case, he added, the paperwork and sales process have been streamlined with new ERP, DäckData. All in all, that has allowed the company to slightly cut the operational spend and become more cost-effective.
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In Finland, nobody actually believes that the retreading industry eventually will go down under the pressure of cheap Chinese tyres and the problems associated with them. It is quite remarkable that in the country nearly every tyre passes through retreading, with some tyres being retreaded even 2-3 times.
For Naantali-based Green Tread Oy, company sales of retreading materials have never been the sole area of interest. Green Tread’s subsidiary companies in the Baltic countries sold 98,000 passenger car and van tyres, 18,000 truck tyres and 800 of new OTR/other industry tyres in
2016, primarily of Kumho and Jinyu brands. In the retreading segment, by comparison, the subsidiary companies sold 12,000 truck retreads and 400 OTR retreads, and Green Tread Oy sold an additional 490 tonnes of rubber and 4.9 million units of spikes, according to the company’s own information.
The company’s founder and one of the owners, Ari Steiner, says that the story of Green Tread began back in 1993, when he sold his former family business named Rengas- Steiner Oy to Michelin and started to look for some new business opportunities. Rengas-Steiner Oy at
