Nokian Tyres has begun constructing a finished goods warehouse at its Dayton, Tennessee production campus that will hold as many as 600,000 tires. The facility will be ready for use by mid-2024.
Nokian Tyres said it and its design-build construction firm, BC Construction Group, broke ground in early March on the 350,000-square-foot warehouse, designed by Pieper O’Brien Herr Architects. Nokian Tyres is continuing its long-term partnership with Faithful+Gould to provide project management services for the facility.
The new warehouse will sit adjacent to Nokian Tyres’ Dayton Factory, which the company says is currently doubling production to manufacture as many as four million tires per year by 2024. The tiremaker is hiring 125 team members to increase its workforce at the Southeast Tennessee campus to 475 employees.
The new storage space will join the company’s nine-warehouse network throughout the US and Canada and will serve a growing volume of customers in the sun belt, the company says.
Nokian said automated conveyors will deliver tires from the factory to the warehouse via an overhead bridge that connects the buildings. At the warehouse, they will be automatically stacked into steel storage racks without being touched by hand.
Nokian Tyres opened its Dayton Factory in the fall of 2019 and began producing tires for commercial sale in early 2020. The company said it is also adding equipment inside the factory’s existing footprint that will enable it to double the production of all-season and all-weather tires. The expansion will also allow Nokian Tyres to add light truck tires to the Dayton Factory’s product mix in 2023.
