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RUSSIA
Ishevsk Tyre Plant: Sometimes it Starts by Chance
The good old problems
It could be safely said that the challenges the retreading companies have to face in Russia are common. Almost every retreader in the country speaks about the bad roads and poor attitude of transport companies who are eager to use their tyres for as long as possible, but only within a single life cycle. Some of them do that because they don’t have any faith in retreading, others because they don’t know about its ver y existence.
“Well, the casings in our business are a sore subject. The lack of the casings is an acute issue. As a rule, the good casings could be taken only from the major transport companies, where a proper scheme for tyre replacement is in place. With a minimal tread layer, these casings could be retreaded,” Ekimchev said.
“It seems that the shortage of good casings is the challenge for all Russian retreaders. In general, drivers have no attitude or desire to care about tyres. Transport companies either don’t know about them or don’t trust them. So,
they simply prefer to run tyres
until they become
inappropriate for retreading,”
he admitted.
Another challenge is, of
course, Chinese tyres. It turns
out that to some extent the
volume and the price for
Chinese products in the tyre
market of Russia depends on
the province. In Udmurtia the problem was quite serious a
couple of years ago, when the
local market was overwhelmed
with poor quality cheap tyres
from China.
However, things have
improved, either thanks to the anti-dumping duties that the Russian government has levied against the Chinese, or
because the quality of these
tyres were not matching the customers’ expectations, or maybe both. One way or another, Izhevsk Tyre Plant has lost no clients and has even enjoyed a rise in demand for retreaded tyres in the regional market over recent years.
“The thing is that Chinese tyres are rather unpredictable in terms of their quality and mileage. We are, in our turn, offering strong quality by using the NOKIAN Noktop tread. It would match the expectations of our clients at any time of the year. So, the demand for retreaded tyres is really on the rise now,” Ekimchev said.
Another thing that would make the retreading business more comfortable in Russia in general, and in Udmurtia in particular, is that if the thing commonly known
as “inscience” would be taken down. There are certain myths still popular about retreaded tyres in Russia that the companies in that industry try to explode.
“There are common problems, like in any other industry. We have to put a lot of effort in to explain to our potential customers what the retreaded tyres are, and how we are producing them. There are still a lot of people who think that we are just taking the old tyre and simply attaching a new tread above it using glue,” Ekimchev explained.
Helping hand
A year ago, the Russian government ruled that the transport companies should either pay ecological fees, or to somehow recycle the used truck tyres. That was good news for the Russian retreaders, as long as by selling the tyre to the retreading plant, the truck owners were able to not only avoid paying the ecological fee, but also to earn some money instead.
In this regard, Izhevsk Tyre Plant has even opened a page on its
Almost every single retreading plant in Russia has been founded by people who already had some experience in tyres, or at least in the transportation industry. In rural
“We began studying the market, the financial issues, technology, sales etc. Up till that moment, we had no experience in that kind of business, or production at all. So, we had to
take it from the ground up. The first question we had to answer was where to take the equipment from,” he added. In 2012 there were quite a lot of offers of various equipment for retreading plant in the Internet, with most of them coming from the different Chinese manufacturers. Ekimchev entered into negotiations with several Chinese suppliers in order to figure out the advantages and the weak points of their offers, so he and his partners could choose the best option to go with.
“We eventually made up our minds, but it turned out that we had to wait for the retreading line for more than half a year. We were not happy
with that, and this is when we accidentally discovered the same equipment available in the neighbouring region,” Ekimchev said.
“The former owners had imported this line, but due to some reason they had not been able to get it up and running. So, they decided to sell it off. We visited them, had a look and made a deal. We were absolutely satisfied. It took us in total three months to prepare the production location and install the equipment at our facility,” he added.
The company is based on the outskirts of Izhevsk, in the village of Berezka, on the territory formerly occupied by a post of the Russian Army. The company released its first retreaded tyres in June 2012. The very first of them the investors kept for themselves, as a good luck charm, and it still remains with the company.
“Today we make from 140 to 180 tyres per month. We mostly retread 315/70 R22.5 and 385/65 R22.5 sizes. The rest are also R22.5 tyres, and they account for 25 to 30 per cent of our production. We are also studying the demand for R19.5 sizes, and if our monitoring shows encouraging results, we plan to start working in this segment as well,” Ekimchev explained.
Alexander Ekimchev, the founder and the director of the Izhevsk Tyre Plant
areas, where ordinar y citizens don’t have any idea what retreading is, businessmen need to have a lot of confidence that by investing into such a facility they would not be wasting their money. In most cases, this confidence comes together with in-depth knowledge of the market, which, in turn, must be based on years of experience.
However, every rule has its exception, and the history of the Izhevsk Tyre Plant apparently is one of them. The company was established in 2012 near the city of Izhevsk, the capital of the Republic of Udmurtia, located along the Volga River and the Western Ural Mountains.
The city is well-known as an important centre of the Russian weapons industry. Military production remains the backbone of the local economy, primarily thanks to the famous Kalashnikov factory –whose products are recognised all over the world.
“The history of our company began in a ver y unusual manner,” recalled Alexander Ekimchev, the founder and the director of the Izhevsk Tyre Plant. “One day I got a phone call from my friend, who asked me to turn on the TV on the Discovery Channel. At that very moment, it was running a story about a retreading plant operating somewhere in Europe. We watched it and decided to use the information in order to start our own new business”.
website, where it is offering to buy used tyres appropriate for retreading. In Russia it is a challenge to not only find money to pay the company to recycle your truck tyre, but also to find such a company, since in many regions not even a single tyre recycling plant has been established yet.
In the future, the company plans to keep taking advantage of the tightening ecological legislation, plus to use the help from the historically traditional ally of Russians – the harsh winter.
“The forecasts that we have for the future are only positive. The order book is constantly growing, as when the transport companies test our tyres, they always come to the conclusion that they are better than
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