Demands in aircraft tire market is huge: Bridgestone Aircraft Tire (China) COO

Lin Haosi, chief operating officer of Bridgestone Aircraft Tire (China) Co., Ltd., accept media interview on July 13, the opening day of the company.

Special nature of aircraft tire

Reporter: Will you please introduce the operating model of your products?

Lin: Usually, a car user buys a tire and dumps a used tire. But for aircraft tires, there are two steps. The first one is supply of new tires. We buy new tires from the headquarters in Japan, from where the goods are delivered to Qingdao, and then they will be sent to the customers. When consumers won’t use the tires any more, they will send back the used tires to us.

The second step is tire retreading. We shave off the rubber on the used tires first, and after a series of processing, the retreading will be finished.

With respect to different models of aircrafts, some tires can be retreaded for three times or six times. We will supply the retreaded tires to consumers again.

Joint efforts of several plants

Reporter: Will you tell us the challenges confronted by your company?

Lin: China’s aviation is expanding rapidly. The greatest difficulty we confront is our production and supply cannot catch up with increasing demand by air companies.

Over the past few years, China’s demand for aircraft tires has been growing swiftly, and their real demands are much more than our prediction.

Reporter: How will Bridgestone address the issue?

Lin: First, the new tire production plant in Japan expands production; second, the Qingdao plant expands retreading capacity.

Bridgestone schedules to build a new tire production plant in Thailand in 2019, then the plants in Qingdao, Hong Kong and Thailand will be able to work together and satisfy market demand.

Reporter: Will you talk about the planning and development objective of the Qingdao plant in future?

Lin: Our greatest objective and task are to satisfy market demand in China.

Customers of Qingdao plant are mainly from China and surrounding Asian countries. Bridgestone headquarters will coordinate the production of each plant and to realize efficient production.

Bridgestone Aircraft Tire (China)’s main businesses are to retread, process, test, maintain used tires and to sell new tires. Its retreading capacity is 40,000 tires/year.