Nitin Mantri, Chairman, Yokohama India in conversation with Zee Business

Increasing investments, market expansion. More importantly, new product lineup. PR expansion plans. We're making 700,000 tires and as of this year we are up to 2.8 million tires. With the Germany announcement that we sent out last week, we are going up to 4.5 million tires, mainly for the Indian market. So in the last, I would say, in the last nine years, we have done a tremendous job of going about five to six times more in capacity for the Indian market segment. Worldwide, we are quite prominent in mainly luxury kind of performance vehicles like BMW, Audis, and also in SUVs. We see a lot of growth in the Indian market in these two segments, so we would like to focus on these two segments mainly for the Indian market. Our motto is driving lifestyle. As Indians are getting more and more on the road, not just for traveling but also for enjoyment, I was traveling on a couple of highways in the last one week in Tamil Nadu and I was quite impressed going for hundreds of miles without having a traffic light, without speed bumps, going over 120 kilometers per hour. So it's really a good time in the Indian market where we can provide the driving lifestyle that has been lacking in this country for a long time. Good enough traveling by road, and I think that gives you a sense of how this market is poised to grow from here.

Sure. So we have our mainstay which is Earth One, which are maybe the best tires in the Indian market, and then we have Advan, which is our tire for the performance vehicles. Within our global portfolio, we have EV tires which can handle the higher torque and higher load that comes with EV vehicles. So we are ready for whatever the Indian market throws at us. On one hand, we are catering to what the market needs, and at the same time we are trying to move the market towards higher performance, higher spec tires than what customers are used to in the past. So our existing plant is in Haryana, and the expansion that we announced last week would be a new kind of building on our existing plant in Visakhapatnam, so that would be a new site. So we have a plant in the north and now we have a plant in the south, that way we are balancing where the customers are. Going back to your earlier question, we are doing two things: we are adding capability. Historically the Indian market was 13, 14, 15 inch tires, now we are getting into 18, 19, 20 inch, so we will have those capabilities in our new plant. On top of that, to give you exact numbers, this year we hope to manufacture and sell close to 3 million tires in the Indian market, and our goal is to go to 4.5 million in sales by 2025.

So right now our focus is mainly on aftermarket. We were at four or five percent market share a few years ago. Last year we closed at 7.5 percent market share in aftermarket, and our goal is to be somewhere between 12 to 15 percent. So we hope to be in the top five tire providers in Indian aftermarket by 2025. So that is the strategy. And finally, our capacity is of global spec, so we can make tires in India for selling to other parts of the world, but right now every kind of tire capacity, every element of that, is mainly for the Indian market. Yokohama is thinking of India as their fourth largest market, and with our current track record we will go up to second or third largest market for Yokohama in the world. So this is a big, big market for our parent company, and this is why you are getting a lot of investment and focus for this market.

Thank you, thanks for your time, Swathi. Nice talking to you.