In a follow-up conference call with various industry trade media, Michelin North America officials shed little additional light on the tiremaker’s plans to build a new OTR plant and expand another in South Carolina.
Both projects were unveiled officially yesterday morning during a press conference at MNA headquarters in Greenville, S.C. That event was attended by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and officials from both Anderson and Lexington counties in the state.
MNA said it would construct an all-new radial OTR tire plant in Anderson County, S.C., and expand its existing OTR plant in nearby Lexington, S.C. The company estimates that the two projects would result in 500 new jobs, and will take an investment of $750 million.
The Anderson OTR tire plant will be adjacent to Michelin’s existing rubber processing plant in Starr, S.C., and will be the third Michelin plant in Anderson County. The company also operates a 2.5-million-square-foot rubber processing plant in Sandy Springs.
Participating in the conference call were Rich Kornacki, MNA executive vice president of specialty tire lines, Roger Lucas, MNA earthmover tire sales and marketing vice president; and Bruce Besancon, MNA director of earthmover tire marketing.
The tiremaker has an “aggressive timeframe” for construction of the new plant, with groundbreaking slated in the next week, and initial tire production taking place by the end of 2013.
At the same time, the Lexington expansion, the second announced for that facility in the last year, has no set timeframe; MNA officials said they did not know when that work would be completed.
The new plant will produce 49-inch and larger radial OTR units, primarily for mining customers, the officials said, but the exact sizes to be produced at either plant will be determined later.
MNA officials were equally cryptic when it came to discussions over how the $750 million investment would be divided between the two projects or how many of the projected 500 new jobs would come from one facility or the other; in both cases “competitive reasons” prohibited responses.
Over the past few months, Project Cougar, as the endeavor was code-named, worked its way through processes to gain state and local funding. In the end, the projects gained $9.1 million in state backing, and “fee in lieu of taxes” deals in both counties, according to MNA officials.
For Gov. Haley, tires are the new gold. In the last 12 months, more than $2.8 billion has been committed to either all-new plants (Bridgestone Americas, Continental Tire the Americas and Michelin) or plant expansions (Michelin and Bridgestone). In the process, South Carolina has become the center of the tire manufacturing universe, with 12 tire plants within its borders.
In the conference call, the MNA officials said the South Carolina sites beat out other potential locations around the world. “There is unprecedented demand for Michelin earthmover tires throughout the world,” said MNA chairman and president Pete Selleck. “It’s a tribute to the productivity of our employees and the pro-business environment in South Carolina that the company is expanding its earthmover capacity in the state where we first began manufacturing in the U.S.”
Worldwide, Michelin currently produces OTR tires in Waterville, Nova Scotia; Campo Grande, Brazil; Le Puy and Montceau-les-Mines, France; Vitoria, Spain; and Zalau, Romania.
