Michelin unveils plant expansion in America

Michelin has announced a major expansion of its Lexington plant in America which builds the biggest earthmoving tyre ranges.

A new brownfield plant will be built alongside the existing facility and will allow a 50% increase in output by early 2007.

This additional production will not fill the new building allowing room to expand capacity even further if necessary, said Prashant Prabhu, president of earthmoving and industrial tyres worldwide.

“We will be able to add capacity in a modular form and this should allow us to stay slightly ahead of demand rather than lagging behind,” he said.

However, he sees no short-term relief to the problem of sourcing large tyres and admitted that all the large earthmoving tyres that will be built in 2006 are already accounted for.

He said that historically the prices of these large tyres had been too low to make justify additional investment and the recent increase in demand had surpassed all the tyre manufacturers predictions.

Michelin is addressing the shortages of smaller earthmoving tyres for ADTs and middle-size dump trucks by building a new factory in Brazil which is expected to begin production in the last quarter of 2007.