Currently, Ceat imports some 500 tires per month, produced for Ceat by Pirelli at its manufacturing plant in Turkey.

“Seeing a gradual increase in demand for domestic radial truck tires, we intend to step up our imports from Pirelli,” Ceat managing director Paras Chowdhary told India media.

Ceat said local demand for radial truck tires is only 3% of the total market, but it expects that share to grow. “As the market for truck radials is too small, we will be meeting the demand through imports only. There are no plans of manufacturing them domestically,” Chowdhary said.

In India, the import duty on tires is lower than that for raw materials, making it financially beneficial to import low demand products instead of producing them locally.

Ceat also sees demand for radial passenger car tires increasing, and has boosted production at its car tire plant in Nashik, India. “We are expanding the capacity of passenger car radials to 65,000 tire per month by the end of this year from the existing 40,000. We are also setting up a 20,000 tore per month facility for passenger car radials in Sri Lanka,” said Chowdhary.