A weekend fire at Shandong Linglong Tire Co. Ltd.'s factory in Thailand has stopped production at the year-old plant and destroyed six of the 15 warehouses.
Merry Wang, who splits her time between Linglong's offices in China and the U.S., says she didn't know many of the details of the fire. She says the cause is still under investigation, that no lives were lost, and the production area of the plant was not affected by the fire.
Still, production at the plant is expected to be suspended for two days during the investigation.
According to the Associated Press, the fire started Sunday night and burned for more than seven hours.
Production at Linglong's Thailand plant - its first production facility outside of China - began in January 2014. When Modern Tire Dealer visited the factory last fall, Feng Wang, the company's CEO, said the plant would produce 8 million passenger tires and 600,000 radial truck tires in 2014. Once all phases of construction at the plant are complete, it is expected to manufacture 12 million passenger tires and 1.2 million truck tires annually.
Horizon Tire is the exclusive distributor of Linglong tires in the U.S. Dale Guerrieri, vice president of marketing for Horizon, says he is awaiting information from Linglong about the fire. He noted "most of our production is coming from the Thailand factory, so as far as the effect on that, I'm just speculating right now."
To read about Modern Tire Dealer's visit to the Thailand factory last year, view Shandong Linglong Tire update.
