June 2012: Nexen Desires To Achieve A Place In The Top Ten Tyre Manufactures

The most important Korean tyre manufacturer, Nexen tyres, has just opened its largest production factory to date.

The new factory is equipped with the highest state of the art automated machinery and will become the most important production point of the company.

In fact, with the production capacity of the new Nexen factory, the company will be able to achieve its goal of increasing production by 300% by 2020.

The Changnyeong plant has been opened since this April and it is scheduled to produce by the end of 2012 around 3 million 4x4, passenger cars and light commercial vehicle tyres.

The production figure will then gradually rise throughout the years reaching around 21 million tyres by 2018 with a daily production of 60,000 units. To achieve this, the company will gradually invest in the plant by 2018 around £650 million.

The new Changnyeong plant, the third plant of Nexen, is located at a distance of 3 hour drive SE of Seoul. Besides this new opened plant the company also operates a plant located at its headquarters site of Yangsan, South Korea and another recently opened plant in Qingdao, China. The total production numbers that these three plants will produce this year are expected around 27 million tyres.

The Nexen Tyre CEO declared that the Changnyeong complex has been designed to be an international competitive tyre manufacturing plant, as the 495,800 square meters facility accommodates the latest manufacturing technologies as well as numerous specialists in the domain. Also, in the projection of the plant the company focused on creating a competitive and stimulating production environment.

By the end of the 2012 the company will hire for its newly opened Changnyeong production plant 780 people. The number of employers will gradually grow to over 2000 after the company has finished the investment process.

The new jobs will be in market jobs, meaning that the employees will mainly be the Korean workforce. The company believes that Korean quality can be guaranteed only by local production and not by outsourcing to the lower economy countries.

Nexen believes that the Korean workforce combined with high automated production facility will result in world acknowledged high performing and eco-friendly tyres.

Nexen desires to enter the top 10 tyre manufacturers by 2020, which means that the company needs to dramatically increase its tyre production.

As said before the company desires to increase its tyre production by 27 million tyres by the end of the year. For the following years, the company has the following production plan:

· in 2013 and 2014 the company desires to produce an average of 40 million tyres

· between 2015 and 2017 the company desires to gradually increase the production number and reach 60 million tyres by the 2017.

· between 2018 and 2020 the company desire to gradually grow to a production number of 80 million tyres.

Nexen growth ambitions might seem as being overwhelming, but the company representatives do not consider it so. They stated that the new production plant, the careful production strategies and the gradual investment plan will ensure that they reach their goal.