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INTERVIEW
Guy Heywood
Hankook’s Strategy Focuses on Retreads to Create Future Mobility Solutions in the CV Sector, says Heywood
In September we interviewed Guy Heywood, Hankook’s Marketing and Strategy Director for Europe, who was able to give us his perspective on current trends with the retreading sector from a tyre
points out, retread sales in Europe are down 14%, but this compares favourably with new tyres, which were down 15-16% over the same period. Indeed, retread sales were down only 4% in July.
consider to be the best of the independent retreaders available across the whole of Europe, and the reason for that is that we want ver y proficient and professional companies to be manufacturing our Alphatread product. We need that to be able to stand by the claim that our Alphatread product is quite close to the performance that you would get from a Hankook first life product.”
Hankook currently work with five countries in terms of production, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, which together represent over 60% of the European market. Although they currently don’t have cold-cure retreading facilities themselves, any requirement for cold-cure product in markets where cold- cure retreads make up the larger part of the market, such in the Nordic countries for example, is catered for in the facilities of Hankook partners.
In terms of product range investment, Hankook currently have a range of 14 sizes within their retread range, and Heywood concedes that to cover
the whole of the hot-cure market, a larger choice of sizes is necessar y. The company, he says, will be working towards that goal. Hankook’s vision, he points out, is that all Hankook’s fleet partners will, in the future, be able to let retread their first life Hankook casing with an Alphatread retread product. Next, we asked Heywood to clarify a statement made by Heywood in an earlier interview with Retreading Business, in which he had described retreading as “a cornerstone of Hankook’s new mobility solutions.”
In answering this question Heywood started by pointing out that Hankook has been a real success stor y within Europe in recent years in the truck and bus sector, moving in a relatively short space of time from being perceived as a new market entrant to being the market leader in many areas. “Hankook is a driven company with real ambition and a clear vision of where it wants to be,” he explained, “and the company has ambitions to work with fleets and dealer partners to
manufacturer’s perspective as well as highlighting Hankook’s strategy for retreading within its business.
Heywood began by pinpointing the trajectory of the retreading industry in recent times by noting that retread sales peaked around 2012-2013, when 30% of the European truck and bus tyre market was made up of retreads. This was followed by a rapid demise where 10% of the market was sheared off, leading to the current scenario, where market share remains at around 20%.
Heywood stated this was due to two major factors, specifically, the huge increase in single-life tyres that were predominantly coming from overseas, as well as the fact that smaller retreaders have struggled to turn a profit. “The consumers, the fleet customers, were choosing what they considered to be lower-cost tyres, rather than buying their historical purchase, which was often a retread product,” explained Heywood. “There’s no such thing as a low-cost tyre.” Heywood points to factors such as reduced fuel efficiency, reduced mileage, reduced performance on the road and the crucial differential that you can’t retread single-life budget tyres as key reasons why the single-use tyre has lost its initial lustre for consumers.
Heywood believes, importantly, that the market for retreads is stabilising. So far this year, he
Heywood attributes the bounce- back within the market to a selection of closely linked factors, including the Covid crisis. “Fleets are generally looking for the most efficient solution, and not necessarily the cheapest first life,” he argues. “In many cases that solution will include retreads.” Heywood explains that Hankook’s policies are to optimise their clients’ tyre contracts, and retreads are often used to do that. In the meantime, he added, environmental and ecological factors are now weighed far more heavily, or as Heywood says, “Before, it was the cherr y on the cake, but now has become mainstream.”
Our next question related to the investments that Hankook are making across Europe, particularly in the countries where Hankook retreads are currently being manufactured. “That’s going to continue, for sure,” confirmed Heywood. “We see a future for retreading as part of our offer, and we see a future for retreading in general in the European marketplace. It’s a great way to reuse fully used premium tyres, as well as an ecological solution, where you can extract the maximum value from the investment of those premium manufacturers when they manufacture and design those tyres.
“We chose to invest in Reifen Mueller,” he added, “and we are also partnering with what we
48 Retreading Business