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FINLAND
Green Tread’s Ari Steiner, Juho Planting and Eeva Heiro
The company’s warehouses in Latvia and Finland now serve as the trading hubs, where the imported products are awaiting orders from the customers. Steiner says that Green Tread is not going to sit still and that the company has some development plans that among others envisages the establishment of a B2B (from business to business) webshop.
“In terms of our future development, we think practically about marketing. We see some potential in rising sales and new markets as in addition to Finland and the Baltics we’ve been selling some rubber and some envelopes to Russia and Sweden. This is why we are developing our retreading material webshop now, because we see some opportunity in interconnecting our business structure, including our two warehouses, so a customer could just open our website, collect the
The company plans to introduce all product ranges currently available in wholesale to the web-store, including such things as precured treads, buffing blades, envelopes, inner tubes, bladders and so on.
“We have been sales representatives in Finland and the Baltic countries for Cooper-Avon precure and strip rubber for over 20 years with high customer satisfaction. Specialised rubber compounds ensure that precure treads or strips rubbers can be reliably used in different retreading applications. For example, a specially mixed Cooper-Avon strip rubber compound is used to produce studded winter rally tyres that are driven in very harsh conditions on ice tracks,” Juho Planting indicated.
“Kraiburg precured treads and cushion rubber have also been our solid option to increase our precure
that time involved 12 outlets across Finland, including three retreading plants, with more than 100 people employed.
Green Tread, however, started by importing Kumho tyres to the Baltics, but soon enough it expanded its operation to the retreading industry as well. Ari Steiner says that he, in fact, was the pioneer in the region, as he entered the first venture in Estonia in 1990 while working for
Michelin, in the times, when the communist regime was still in place and the culture of retreading was not yet developing.
“In that time, Estonia was still the part of Soviet Union and we established a small car retreading factory near Tallinn, importing an old retreading line from Finland. And my younger brother, who is a lawyer, organised that deal and managed the necessary procedures, because among others we also had to receive some permission from Moscow to make the investment. This company still exists on a small scale in Estonia,” Ari Steiner stated. Steiner recalls that in the 90s the Baltics looked like very promising niche for his company’s expansion, because it was an open market where virtually everything had to be done from scratch. The point was that the retreading plants operating in the Soviet Union went down one by one, because all the equipment was designed to work with tyres of the Soviet type. The fall of the Iron Curtain meant that the trucks and vans from the Western World came to the country, and the regional retreading industry got new type of tyres to deal with.
“When we entered into a venture in Latvia with the company named Riepneks, it appeared that all the equipment there was worth nothing and simply could not be used, with the exception only of the mixing mill. The Soviet small trucks there were consuming 20-25 litres of petrol, while Western vans with the similar bearing capacity consumed about 10 litres, so it was easy to guess Soviet tyres would disappear
quickly. So, we took this precure retreading machinery and moved it to the Baltics. By that time, all retreading here was hot and that also disappeared completely very soon,” he indicated.
It did not take too long for Green Tread to figure out that the patterns for local tyres could be the same as those used in Nordic countries. In terms of climate, Estonia is like south of Finland with 70-80 per cent car tyres having spikes, Latvia is like the south of Sweden with less than 50 per cent of tyres having spikes, and Lithuania is like Denmark as nobody is using tyres with spikes here in the winter time.
In later years Green Tread also entered some projects in the retreading industry, including in 1994 with AS Vevid in Estonia, where the retreading factory is manufacturing 8,000 truck tyres per year; Lithuania with UAB Retola with a retreading plant for 1,500 truck tyres and Russia, specifically in St. Petersburg. In the last case, Ari Steiner said that he had to sell his stake after all, because business in Finland and the Baltics by that time was already too time-consuming.
It is time for a well-elaborated plan to go online
Ari Steiner pointed out that the subsidiary companies of Green Tread in the Baltics are operating on their own, whilst the mother company with its central office in Naantali itself is coordinating retreading material supply as well as part of new tyre purchases. “Centralising our purchases gives us additional benefits when negotiating prices,” said Steiner.
“Nowadays we import tyres and rubber from various countries. In particular, we import rubber from England, Turkey, Austria and Italy, also purchasing some quantities from Malaysia. And our warehouse facility in Latvia is very good for storing the products. It used to be a repair factory for trucks, and this is why it has a very big storage space,” he added
items he requires and get them delivered. We think that it will help us develop our retreading material sales in Scandinavia, in Russia and maybe in some other countries,” he said.
The company is already selling new tyres in localised webshops in Finland (B2B), Latvia (B2B), Lithuania (B2B) and Estonia (B2B & B2C). Juho Planting, Ari Steiner’s colleague and the lead person in ecommerce development, revealed that the company has invested a lot of money and put a lot of thought into the web-store project and is looking forward launching the webshop dedicated for retreading materials. He explained that the company’s advantage always was that it was willing to deliver even small batches of the products to the customers.
“Order only what you need and if that is two rolls of precure tread or one box of buffing blades - no problem. Especially for small or medium sized retreaders our service is very convenient since they don’t have to keep large stock themselves and can concentrate on business rather than stock planning. Our deliveries are fast, and customers will receive their orders within 1-3 days,” he noted.
tread range. Our close cooperation with Kraiburg has lasted years, and our end customers have been very satisfied with the quality of Kraiburg products. We have been selling MAE curing tubes, bladders and envelopes for 15 years and are very excited about their new second-generation ST-envelope type that is easy to fit and is very durable. Customers who have been using these have been very pleased and tell us that they don’t need to order envelopes as often compared to what they had been doing previously,” he added.
It turns out that running of the web- store is a matter of real science. Juho Planting explained that some studies show that a significant share of customers filling in the basket and not making the final order in the first several minutes after this will eventually leave the website without any purchases. In this case, the customers support service may really help, coming online and contacting the customers asking if he requires any support. In addition, the basket with the chosen goods remains active for some time and it also will send notification to the customer’s e-mail address informing that he still can pick up the chosen goods if he wants.
All in all, the managers of Green
36 Retreading Business