"We are totally renewing our summer and winter tire line-ups," Nokian Tyres plc officials announced late last week during a new product introduction in Ivalo, Finland, that moderntiredealer.com attended. "We have a policy that 25% of our sales has to come from new products."
By "new," Nokian spokesman Kari-Pekka Laaksonen means "launched this year or last year."
Nokian introduced three new tires during the Ivalo event, which also was attended by a number of key Nokian tire dealers and distributors from the United States and Canada.
Two of the tires, a studded passenger tire named the Hakkapeliitta 5 and an SUV tire named the Hakkapeliitta Sport Utility 5, are currently available for order in North America. Another, the WR G2, an all-weather tire, will be available in North America in August 2007.
North America will be a big growth market for Nokian during 2007, Laaksonen told dealers.
Nokian's sales in the U.S. and Canada grew by 18.3% during 2006. North America makes up approximately 9% of the company's total global sales. (The Finnish tiremaker's highest growth region in 2006 was Russia, where the firm's sales rose 70%.)
Nokian's plants in Nokia, Finland, and in Russia (near St. Petersburg), will manufacture approximately nine million passenger tires this year, says Laaksonen.
Nokian also has off-take production agreements in place at facilities in Findlay, Ohio; Slovakia; Spain; India; China; and Indonesia.
