Six TBR Tire Import Takeaways So Far in 2025

An early look at the number of truck and bus tires imported into the U.S. so far in 2025 shows that globally, total units have dropped. But the trends across the top five TBR tire producing countries aren’t universal.

As of late April, the U.S. Census Bureau database shows import data for January and February 2025. (There’s typically a two-month lag.) But using two months of data from 2025 and comparing it to numbers from the first two months of each year dating back to the pre-pandemic 2019, there are some interesting trends.

Here are six tire import takeaways:

• Overall, global imports of TBR tires into the U.S. are down by 7.9% in 2025 compared to 2024. A total of 3.30 million TBR tires have been shipped to the U.S. so far this year, down from 3.59 million after the first two months of 2024. (Note: that two-month total from 2024 is by far the biggest total in data MTD analyzed dating back to 2019.)
• In 2024, the top five largest exporters of TBR tires into the U.S. were, in order, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Canada and Cambodia. In the first two months of 2025, three of the five are ahead of their 2024 pace. Thailand and Canada’s imports are down year-over-year. Thailand’s TBR imports are down 40.9%, according to the data so far available. TBR tire imports from Canada are down 7.1% compared to 2024 figures.
• Yes, Thailand's imports are down dramatically in the first two months of 2025. But look at the total number of tires — it still represents 30% of the total number of TBR tires imported into the U.S. in the first two months of this year.
• The fastest-growing import market, Cambodia, is still growing by leaps and bounds, despite all the talk about tariffs. Year-to-date, Cambodia’s TBR exports to the U.S. have increased by a whopping 275.3% so far in 2025. Keep in mind, in 2022, no medium truck tires were imported into the U.S. from Cambodia. In 2024, the country leapfrogged its way onto the charts as the fifth-largest source of TBR tires for the U.S. market.
• Of last year’s top five TBR tire producing countries, two so far are showing signs of their strongest import years yet. The first is of course Cambodia. But the January and February totals for Vietnam are also impressive, with a 9.7% increase over 2024 shipments in the same two-month period. In two months in 2025 Vietnam has already shipped almost 20% of the total number of tires it shipped to the U.S. in all of 2024.
• It's not a record start, but Japan’s TBR tire imports are up almost 26.1% in the first two months of 2025 compared to the same period a year ago. That rate of growth makes them the second-fastest mover among these five leading countries. But Japan’s strongest two-month start to a year was in 2023, when it shipped 431,510 tires into the U.S.