Continental to invest €40 million in Korbach facility

As part of its Vision 2025 strategy, Continental Tire will be investing around €40 million in its Korbach manufacturing facility in Hesse, Germany over the next five years.

The funds will be used to set up a specialist production line for passenger / light truck 19- to 22-inch tyres, for which demand is becoming ever greater in the international original equipment and replacement markets.

The investment will also be earmarked for the central development of the process technology required to manufacture these tyres. The large array of ever-stringent demands as to the performance characteristics of these high-tech products means that the engineers and production staff at Continental are expected to deal with increasingly challenging problems, some of which pertain to process technology.

“With this investment, we are taking deliberate action to scale up our investment programme in the further development of product-specific expertise in tyre design, tyre tread, tyre contours, and tyre compounds, as well as in the expansion of our global tyre production capacity. In bundling our expertise at the Korbach site, we will also be taking away some of the burden on our other production sites in a bid to drive forward the development of new high-tech processes for our tyre plants worldwide from a central location. Increasing our investment in new, highly efficient tyre testing technology such as the AIBA, for example, will help us to further improve our technological position,” explained Nikolai Setzer, Executive Board member for the Tire division at Continental.