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Oblast. I don’t like to criticise anyone, but our clients say that the quality of his tyres is extremely poor. We know that he is working on some Chinese equipment and while we have an automated process, at his plant most stages are performed manually”.
For retreaders in Russia the most important advertisement is “the word of mouth”. There is no point on spending money on advertising in the media, or anywhere else, because the quality of the offered products is the best thing that can say everything about the retreader after all.
“If the word of mouth was singing at every corner that we have a bad quality of service, nobody would come to us. That is why we are trying to sort out every particular incident, trying to figure out how and why it happened. Every problem is my personal headache, because it is necessary to understand at what stage and for what reasons the mistake has occurred, so we would be able to avoid it in future,” Uvenchikov said.
“In fact, it would be easier to give a new tyre and forget about it, especially because the problems occur extremely rarely. However, we want our customers to know that we do care. If we didn’t, we would never have purchased that ultrasonic machine. As far as I know, only 10 per cent of retreaders in Russia use it, and these are Michelin, Goodyear and so on, but why should our tyres have poorer quality than theirs. After all, we produce the same retreaded tyres,” he emphasised. In the first year of its operation Recycl Tyre has been working with roughly 150 tyres per month, with half of this amount accounted for retreading and half for repair. The company has never chased big volumes. Uvenchikov indicated, that the right reputation will help the company to expand its customer base, but that should happen in due course of time. “The only big problem for us is associated with our location in the small town with a population of 68,000. When the economic crisis comes, it takes its toll, because small towns are dying first. So, if in the big cities people don’t feel the impact of the crisis, we have struggled against it for almost four years and it doesn’t seem like it is about to go away,” Uvenchikov stated.
“However, we won’t give up, as there are still big regions, located
nearby, including Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen Oblasts. We are collecting tyres, inspecting them, retreading them and constantly working to expand our order book,” he added.
Business economics
In terms of casings, Uvenchikov said, he has not purchased even a single imported one yet. The company has a partner in Germany, which urges him to import some trial batches, but the economy of such trade would be ver y questionable, at least in some extent due to the high logistics
costs, as the tyre will have to make a 1,000 km trip to get from the western Russian border to the Urals.
“In Russia I can purchase casings for Rub 1,000-2,000 (US$16-33), while the price for a European casing starts from Eur 35 and, after the payment of all customs duties and with the logistics spends, its cost reaches Eur 60-70 in the end. So what margin, what profit, there will be, when the tyre is retreaded? The answer – there will be none,” Uvenchikov estimated.
“In terms of raw materials, we are working with the raw rubber of
Rosvik and tread line of Retreading Technologies Service. I cannot say anything bad about either product, as the price and quality completely suit us. We have some clients, who are willing to purchase retreaded tyres made with the Marangoni products only and in this case, we are ordering Marangoni tread line and cushion rubber in Moscow and perform retreading completely on German materials”.
In this case, the price is slightly higher, but the tyre has a higher mileage as well. As the rule, the tyre retreaded on Russian materials has a mileage of