Page 50 - RB-93-20-2

COMPANY NEWS
KRAIBURG Austria: Looking Positive into a Fragile Future
The past few years have been tough for the retreading business in Europe, but Kraiburg still has faith the industry could be once again on the ascent as some supportive measures are being discussed among the lawmakers in different countries.
It is yet to be seen how the ongoing epidemic of the novel coronavirus Covid-19 could impact the retreading industry in the European Union (EU), said Stefan Mayrhofer, Deputy General Manager of Kraiburg Austria.
Speaking during an interview with Retreading Business early March when the epidemic had already started gaining momentum in most countries
mainly hit with the import of cheap tyres from China and some other countries. The hot cure market has not been affected with that problem to the same extent,” Mayrhofer said, adding that despite some protective measures embarked on by European regulators, it looks like the crisis in the industry is far from being over yet.
“From my point of view this is still an ongoing process. We see that the precured market still has problems, and the companies focusing on precured products are in trouble. For this reason, there are some retreaders in Europe who were previously focused on selling precured tread products, and
It is quite possible that the cheap Asian tyres managed to find alternative ways of getting to the European market, through some other countries in
on the possible decisions and what we try to do is to speed them up and to get to the point when some certain things are done and certain help is
Christoph Priewasser
Stefan Mayrhofer in Kraiburg’s finished products warehouse
and strict quarantine measures had not yet been put in place in Austria, he acknowledged that the demand on the market had indeed been week, although at that point it was hard to say what reasons were behind that. “We really saw some changes in demand during the past days, and there could be a chance this could be associated with these issues in Italy and some other countries,” Mayrhofer said.
Market is down
When it comes to the precured tread sector, there is nothing special about the weak demand, as the manufacturing conditions in this segment have been far from perfect for many years now.
“The demand on the European precured tread sector has been weakening for several years. I believe this market has been
now they diversify their range with premium hot cure products. It seems to be easier to sell hot cured products in competition to the new tyres now,” Mayrhofer explained.
The industry has benefited from the anti-dumping duties introduced by the European Commission against the Chinese tyres in 2018, but that victory was not full.
“2019 was already a year when we saw a decrease in the tyre aftersales market, and we believe that the decrease in sales of new tyres was slightly bigger than that of the retreaded tyres. From that point of view, there was a slight improvement, but the whole market was on a downward trend. So, basically, yes, we’ve got some additional market share, but in a weakening market. At the end of the day, volumes were still lower than in 2018,” Mayrhofer said.
the Asian region such as Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
“This is one of the possible reasons why we have not evidenced a major improvement on the market. The other reason is that during the past few years a lot of retreaders in Europe shut down their operations. What is also important is that there are no opportunities for any new players to emerge in the industr y anymore,” Mayrhofer added.
Throwing a flotation ring
On this background, Kraiburg is putting a lot of efforts to support their partners across Europe.
“On the one hand we try to support our customers, the retreaders, the best way we can do, with good products, innovative solutions and so on. Additionally, we tr y to do some lobbying work together with Bipaver and other similar retreading associations to further help the retreading business to recover as much as possible,” Mayrhofer said.
“At the moment, we are strongly focused on making emphasis on the ecological aspect of retreading and its importance for the circular economy,” he noted.
“There are a lot of discussions
allocated,” Mayrhofer said.
“We met delegates of Bipaver and some other associations at the UNECE in Geneva, and we were working together on tyre- related regulations for new truck tyres, for retreads, for passenger car tyres and so on. The main point is that now, together with Bipaver and the German association BRV , we want to give retreading companies an opportunity to label their products, in line with the UNECE Regulation 117, and to give them the possibility to deal with the huge amount of costs,” said Christoph Priewasser, product manager of Kraiburg. “These are primarily test-related costs. For instance, the costs of a standard procedure to determine the rolling resistance, the wet grip and the noise level are up to EUR 20.000 per tyre design and tyre dimension, and we have different new tyre brands, different brands of tread materials and different designs, so it is dramatically huge in terms of costs. This work is also about to decide what we would like to promote as Kraiburg, with what we would like to assist on our side. The main goal is to get the possibility to label the tyres in accordance with the 1222/2019 regulation in the course of the next two years,” Priewasser said.
50 Retreading Business