Page 12 - Retrading Business N101 2022-02
P. 12
COMPANY
Report
Europe is tightly linked to the circular economy and carbon neutrality, topics which are likely to be on the agenda in the continent for the coming decades. In the view of CEO Carlos Marques, the past few years have quite challenging for European retreaders, with the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on the transport industry and logistics.
“Prior to 2020, sales were slowly rising. After the introduction of anti-dumping duties on imported Chinese truck tyres in Europe in 2018, retreading companies, in general, had a rise in demand for truck tyres as the diffe- rence in price, when compared to Chinese products, got much higher, turning retreaded truck tyres into a more competitive and pro- with Retreading Business.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Recauchu- tagem 31, which has produced the FEDIMA brand since 1992, had to close its retreading
plant for a month and reopen it gradually in order to avoid workers getting infected.
“The economic impact [of the pandemic] was huge, and we faced a logistics crisis, the rise of transport costs, a lack of raw materials, and the increase in prices in general,” Mar- ques said, adding that the pandemic helped the company to get many insights about its business, substantially improving production costs and daily management.
- mance bounced back, with sales going up by
20%, which was an exceptional result, Mar- ques claimed.
A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES
The company was founded in 1969 under the name Recauchutagem 31 in a 400 square me- that in 1991, it became necessary to develop and differentiate the production, so the com- pany started bead-to-bead retreading and registered separate brands, FEDIMA for car, light truck, 4x4 and truck tyres, and CAFEMA for agricultural tyres.
P. 12
