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GLOBAL RETREADING CONF.
Tim van Rijken, Chair of BIPAVER
was shrinking, so the number of retreads in Europe reduced from 5.8 million in 2007 to only 4.1 million in 2016, and this is obviously not a coincidence.
“The European tyre market has been gradually recovering since 2013, but it is important to have a look at who is benefiting from this recovery. We see that the retreading segment lost nearly 30 per cent [since 2007] in volume, so its market share reduced to below 30 per cent and the later estimates show that it may be even lower, at around 22 per cent. The new tyre manufacturers also have their market share reducing, so its only importers who are taking advantage of the increased demand for commercial tyres in Europe,” van der Rijken said.
“The retreading industry has not been left untouched, as we’ve seen a lot of closures over the past few years. Since 2014 to BIPAVER 75 closures have been reported in 15 member states. The majority of closures took place in Germany and Italy. We don’t know the exact number of retreading plants in Europe, but approximately 20 per cent of them have disappeared during the past three years, so this is really serious,” van der Rijken added.
In this situation, new tyre manufacturers and retreaders formed an alliance and went to the European Commission suggesting that what is happening in the market might not be fair, and might be the result of dumping of Chinese tyres. That complaint was officially supported by more than 45 per cent of the European new tyre manufacturers and retreaders, and that enabled the European regulators to initiate investigation on this issue.
“The investigation was officially started on 11 August 2017 and it included sampling of 11 European producers, both new tyre manufacturers and retreaders, as well as 4 exporting producers in China. The investigators also
selected a country to make a comparison in production costs, because to identify dumping is a very complicated task. Out of eight countries with anti- dumping duties they selected Brazil to make the comparison,” van der Rijken said.
“In February 2018 they [the European Commission] said
that they had found enough evidence to say that they would be able to introduce some provisional
measures. In this regard, from February 3 the regulation required the registration of all the imports on the market. So, every imported Chinese tyre was ordered to be registered by the customs authorities. On 8 May they announced the provisional measures, while the definitive measures are scheduled to be adopted by 10 November 2018,” van der Rijken said.
That means that the investigation is still going on, and there is still no absolute certainty on how it is going to end. It faces a resistance from the Chinese side, as exporters insist that the calculation made by the European regulating authorities
within the anti-dumping investigation was not accurate. And, of course, introducing of any restrictive measures on import is a matter of politics, so it is hard to say for sure what would eventually come up.
It is believed that in the third tier of the European tyre market, which according to BIPAVER included budget new and retreaded tyres from the independent retreaders is not in its best shape now. This part of this industry has been facing strong pressure from imports, resulting in its average profitability of sales being reduced from 6.1 per cent of sales turnover as of 2014 to minus 0.4 per cent in 2016 and