Page 26 - Retrading Business N101 2022-02
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COUNTRY
REPORT - MALAYSIA
“A retread strategy, mixed with a proper maintenance strategy here could help reduce tyre expenditure, thus making bottom-line savings.”
We’ve all seen tyre prices on the move (upwards!), some up almost 30% in a year, but the shift to a new approach for commercial businesses seems to be odd- ly unquestioned. We’ve even seen orga- nisations running out of supplies, forcing customers to look at different brands, but we haven’t yet seen a re-awakening of the ‘retread revolution’. However, from a long-term outlook, it feels like the future is going to belong to the retread due to their environmental impact. The simple fact is that logistics and land mo- to operate without them, but the cost is becoming increasingly prohibitive. As organisations consider what is looking like a growing ‘downgrade’ strategy, they should also be considering a retread stra- tegy.
Across the world, retreading is trending
players. The recent deal for the Bridges- tone plant in Béthune, France, to work as a retreading factory producing 900,000 tyres by 2025 is a good sign that there’s still commercial viability to invest in a new retreading endeavour. Continental is also looking at whether it is feasible to start retreading passenger car tyres, both of which are a distinct departure from the perceived wisdom that retreading is for heavy goods vehicles only. The US retread market is gradually growing as more and for ways to not only save money but also to be more environmentally aware.
Saving money is now not enough, we are all very aware of the damage that using one-use tyres can create for the environ- ment, but we’re often not aware that sa- ving money now can have a longer-term
data and reasoning now clearly show that it is often the case that retreads can ex- are on par in terms of safety, as most tyre breakdowns are caused by road hazards whether new or retread. There’s also a tendency to brush aside the fact that shows nearly 70% of all tyre blowouts are on the steer axle, where retreads are sel- dom used (Blowout Resistant Tire Study for Commercial Highway Vehicles, Uni- versity of Michigan, 2020). There’s a good chance that if such research was carried out in Malaysia, we’d see the same sort of results, and the cause of most tyre dama- ge would be lack of maintenance or run- ning overweight. We do have to deal with the fact here that ‘tayar celup’ are seen to be the bad guy in any story, but for most retreads, it’s simply not true.
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