April 21, 2010
'We were able to maintain our position'
Retread execs sound off on difficult market
By: Mike Manges
“We’re seeing fleets that are looking to retread more than they have in the past,” says Scott Damon, vice president of marketing, Bridgestone Bandag Tire Solutions.
Prevailing thought has always been when fleet budgets are stretched thin, retreads — and the cost savings they represent — become that much more attractive.
That’s still true, but conditions in the commercial tire market are much tougher than they’ve been in many years. Freight movement, while showing tiny month-over-month increases, remains below healthy levels. Many trucks continue to sit, unused. And fleets continue to cannibalize their own equipment, pulling tires off idle trucks and putting them on the trucks they’re still running. It’s a challenging situation by anyone’s standards.
In this edition of Commercial Tire Dealer, executives from the four largest truck tire retread companies in the United States — Bridgestone Bandag Tire Solutions, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Michelin Retread Technologies Inc. and Marangoni Tread North America — discuss how their respective firms are trying to meet the many challenges facing the U.S. retread market. (Together, these companies hold 96.5% of the U.S. truck tire retread market, according to Modern Tire Dealer research.)
Executives also discuss what 2010 will bring, as well as the development of new technologies, the viability of environmentally friendly retread products, and other hot topics.
The series begins with an interview with Scott Damon, vice president of marketing for Bridgestone Bandag Tire Solutions, the country’s biggest retread company.
Nearly three years after Bridgestone Americas Inc.’s billion-dollar acquisition of Bandag Inc. and two years after the merger of Bandag’s North American retread operations with Bridgestone’s North American truck tire sales and marketing group to form a new entity, Bridgestone Bandag Tire Solutions (BBTS), Bandag remains the U.S. truck tire retread leader with 42% market share, Modern Tire Dealer research shows.
Despite its size, BBTS was not immune to the problems that plagued the commercial tire market in 2009. “We were able to maintain our position in the industry,” says Scott Damon, vice president of marketing for BBTS, “but since the overall industry was down, we were also down to the same degree.”
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