Bridgestone Americas Inc. is upping the ante on domestic production, to the tune of 2.24 million square feet. In addition, it will invest $36.6 million in its Warren County, Tenn., plant -- no brick and mortar required.
Last week, the company announced an additional 474,000-square-foot addition to its consumer tire plant in Aiken County, S.C. Added to a previously announced 266,000-square-foot addition last July, the plant will expand by nearly three-quarters of a million square feet.
According to the 2011 Modern Tire Dealer Facts Issue, the Aiken County facility has the capacity to produce 25,000 passenger and light truck tires per day. The expansions will add an estimated 12,000 tires a day to that.
The new 1.5 million-square-foot radial off-road tire plant, which will be built on a site near the Aiken County facility, will manufacture large and giant OTR tires that currently are manufactured exclusively at Bridgestone's Shimonoseki and Kitakyushu plants in Japan. MTD estimates that will allow the company to produce close to 100 OTR tires per day in the United States.
The investment in Warren County, Tenn., will increase truck tire production capacity by 900 tires a day. The Warren County plant has the capacity to produce 8,000 truck and bus tires a day.
When all the dust on the construction sites settles, Bridgestone will have increased its U.S. capacity by some 13,000 tires a day -- a 15% increase over the total capacity at its six U.S. plants -- at a cost of more than $1.3 billion.
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