Graber Says 2025 Has Been ‘Strong' for Toyo

Michael Graber, CEO of Toyo Tire U.S.A. Corp., says he’s “really happy” with his company’s performance in 2025 and intends to build on that momentum.

"It’s been a really strong year,” Graber recently told MTD. “Our unit volume is up and revenue has followed."

Highlights of Toyo’s 2025 include a big investment at the company's consumer tire plant in White, Ga., and continued growth of its Driven associate dealer program.

"We just announced a $200 million investment in our Georgia plant to build more light truck tires here in the U.S., which is where we sell them,” said Graber. “We want to make the Georgia plant more of a premium-product plant and push the more broadline stuff to (plants in) Serbia, Malaysia and other points around the world.”

The Georgia plant, which opened in 2005, produces around 6.8 million tires annually - “mostly light truck.” Toyo also is pulling in light truck tires from Japan and Serbia. (Toyo’s consumer tire plant in Serbia opened three years ago.)

The company's Driven program remains another area of growth. Through September 2025, “units for the Driven program were up 12% year-over-year,” Tim Chaney, Toyo’s vice president of marketing, told MTD. "The number of participating dealers is up 18% year-over-year.”

Chaney describes Driven as “a standardized program that helps dealers with profitability and rewards” and credits its success “to the legwork on the part of our field sales staff. They’re working hard with distributors to sign new dealers in territories where maybe we were thin before."

Graber said Toyo has a small sales team “compared to our competitors. But we really directed them last year to sign associate dealers and make sure pull-through demand is good.

"What we’re finding is a lot of those associate (dealers) are being kind of eaten up by consolidation on the retail side and it’s giving us a presence at some big retailers where we really didn’t have much of a presence before. It gives us a chance to get in the door with some of the big retailers. So we’re looking at (consolidation) as a positive.”

Toyo is also “very happy” with its TBR tire business, according to Graber. “We have the right mix of customers and we occupy a good spot on the price spectrum. TBR is one area where we’ve moved from tier-three to tier-two, as far as brand reputation and product positioning.”

On the consumer tire side, “we want to keep a strong presence in tier-two," said Graber. "That’s what we’re concentrating on: grabbing share and then holding onto it.”