Conti gaining ground in retreading with new development center

ROCK HILL, S.C.—At its very base, retreading hasn't changed that much.

The process still involves stripping the tread off a tire, preparing the casing, applying a new tread, and sending the tire back on the road.

But officials at Continental Tire the Americas L.L.C. say there's much more to the process, and they are going to utilize their newly opened Continental Retread Solutions Development Center in Rock Hill to take their retreading business to a new level.

"I think that we have, as an industry, gotten into this paradigm that this is just the way it is," said John Cox, head of Retread Americas within Conti's truck tire unit. "And I think that as this market has expanded, the retreading hasn't necessarily kept up."

Now Cox has been around the retreading sector for about three decades, starting with Bandag back before the retreading leader became part of Bridgestone Americas. He's been in the field, worked in technical services, had a prior stint with Continental, left to work for a fleet, and now returned to Conti for this post.

One observation Cox has seen is there are fewer dealers out there retreading, but those that are still in the business are turning out more retreads than ever before.

"Small changes can make a huge impact to a dealer's bottom line," Cox told Rubber News at the recent official opening of the development center. "We hope to not just stick with small changes, though, but you know it doesn't take much to save a minute. And if you save a minute when you're doing 1,000 tires a day, boy, that's a heck of a change that you have within your retread process."

And while the basic premise of retreading remains the same, there have been changes to optimize and bring new technology—including automation—to a process that remains a key part of the commercial tire value proposition.

"Development has happened inside, with curing elements, buffing cycles, buffing parameters, casing developments," said Shaun Uys, vice president of Conti's U.S. truck tires business. "And I think those are the things that have changed over time, with everybody trying to get more and more retreads out of a particular casing.

"So the process is relatively the same, but it's become a little bit more sophisticated. If you go back in time, you saw far more 'gators' lying on the freeways all over the place, whereas that should not be something that is around today."

Traceability also is a factor that has been upgraded as retreading has matured, according to Renato Sarzano, senior vice president for Continentals truck tires, Americas, unit. "Basically all this information is retained and, if tomorrow there is failure or something like that, you can go back and say 'What did I do here that led to this failure?' And then you keep improving the process," he said.

Cox said the work to move retreading technology forward will take the form of both short- and long-term projects. Some will be multi-year in development time, while others will be much shorter in scope.

"Our plan is and our goal is to deliver a project every month," Cox said. "The larger projects that we are working on, some of them will be just like Apple. They will work on things in secret and never talk about it, and then shelve the project and you never know that they did.

"There are several projects (of ours) I'm sure will not come to market, but we'll learn from it. Something that doesn't come to market doesn't mean that there aren't going to be 15 new ideas that come from that project."

Continental has been in the retreading business in its home European market for decades. But it's only been active in the U.S. retreading sector since 2011, and the firm knows it has a lot of ground to make up.

And that's where the Retread Solutions Development Center in Rock Hill—located just about 10 miles from Continental's tire headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C.—comes in.

Designed and set up as a retread shop, the center will allow the Conti team to test new processes in the same environment used by its Continental Retread Solutions Partners. It also gives Conti the ability to train their partners from the center using the same equipment the dealer partners use in their shops.

Fleet owners will be able to tour the center to see firsthand the technology that is used on their tires during the ContiLifeCycle retreading process.

"We're a little bit late to the game in the U.S. on retreading," Uys told Rubber News. "We now realize that you need to be inside the retread business to be a premium player inside the U.S. market, especially because we're getting more and more fleets requesting us to have more of a solution than just a new tire."

He added that Conti is banking on the center to take what maybe has been seen as an "art" in the past, and start implementing productivity improvements and product enhancements. "I think the biggest advantage that we have is linking our digital solutions together now that enables us to set ourselves apart from everybody else," Uys said.

Sarzano said looking at the whole lifecycle of a commercial tire—from production as a new product, through retreading and then end of life—is an area that Continental can excel in.

"It's a very important topic for us because it comes from the materials we use to the time where we are going to dispose of the tire, and this is the overall picture for us," he said. "We want to control somehow and be influencing from the material used up to the point where the tire is out of life. Then we have to also understand if there is any opportunity for this circular thing, and that we can use part of the end-of-life tire as a raw material for the new tires we produce."

The backbone of that is the ContiLifeCycle concept, that starts with a new tire produced with a 3G casing, and continues with the ContiTread retreads. Uys said a premium tire supplier must be present in OE, and then be well-respected and have partnerships inside your fleet customers. He added that Conti makes a premium tire that meets fleet requirements and allows them to keep overall costs down.

"You need a retread process so they can use the casing over and over again in order to have low total operating cost," he said. "We have the ability to cover the fleets with a new tire that goes into OE all the way through the retread process until the tire comes out the other side."

Being in the underdog role, as Conti is in retreading in North America, also can be an advantage over more established players looking to protect what they've already got, according to Cox.

"I think that when you're playing defense, you're playing defense," he said. "I think for us, we have a bunch of folks who are passionate about playing offense. We don't want to stand still. Now we've spent several years establishing what our retread process is. We've spent several years establishing the baselines of everything that we're doing, and now we have a good benchmark against everything that we need to do, and we're able to move forward and push forward."

And despite its relative newcomer status in the region for retreading, the Conti officials are pleased with the progress made thus far and are excited for the opportunities that lie ahead.

"We spent a lot of time building our process, getting certain economies of scale inside the dealers that are selling out there," Uys said. "We feel now that we have got a process, we've got a system, we've got whatever we need in order to become a much bigger player inside the retread world than what we were."

Sarzano concurred, saying Continental had put a lot of focus on retreading, and it has an R&D staff that has developed compounds and other components critical to making the firm "best in class" for retreading. It also has two plants—one in the U.S. and one in Mexico—with capacity to produce treads to support those growth opportunities.

Continental also has the mindset that when it enters a particular market, it wants to do so at the highest level in terms of performance, durability and all other aspects of the business.

"We have an internal saying. 'We are good where we decide to be good,' " Sarzano said. "So we have to decide to be good at retreading, and then we're going to be good at retreading."

And that's where the Conti retreading officials see themselves now in North America. Processes in place. Ready to innovate. Poised for growth.