TOKYO (May 15) — Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd. management is targeting 8-percent annual sales growth and double-digit improvement in profitability for the next three years as the company.
Yokohama management said it projects the company will more than double in size by the firm's 100th anniversary in 2017 to nearly $9 billion, and achieve operating return on sales of 10 percent. For the near term, the firm expects its tire business to outpace its other business sectors, raising the tire division's share 3 percentage points to about 77 percent of total corporate sales.
To achieve such growth, Yokohama management foresees a strategy of emphasizing higher value-added products, developing and/or adopting new materials, developing new production processes and compact production platforms and expanding production capacity in Asia. Yokohama is targeting annual capacity of 56.6 million tires by 2009, a 24-percent jump over the current level.