Reidrubber studies expansion plans

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32522, 4 February 1971, Page 14

Reidrubber studies expansion plans

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, February 3. Major expansion of tyre production—particularly of radial tyres—is planned at the Reidrubber works at Penrose, Auckland. A four-man technical team from the B. F. Goodrich Company in America has arrived to advise on production aspects of the planned expansion, which is aimed at local and export tyre markets.

Reidrubber is now a division of Feltex New Zealand, Ltd, which with this mission is making increased use of the technical assistance which was already being given by Goodrich before the Feltex take-over of Reidrubber last year. The technical survey will take about a fortnight and It will be about four months before the report comes back from America to Feltex. The expansion envisaged will require Feltex to embark on a considerable capital expansion. However, it was said today that no increase in the Goodrich shareholding—now about 5 per cent in Feltex — is foreseen.

Expansion of production by Reidrubber in other fields is under study by other Goodrich groups. Mr J. B. McCarthy, the newly appointed Reidrubber general manager, who is from Goodrich, said today: “We in the tyre and rubber industry have the same faith in the motor business in Australia and New Zealand as the motor industry itself.” An exhaustive survey had been made of the expected growth of the tyre market over the next 10 years, he said. The team of Goodrich engineers had now been called in to “equate the needs as we see them into people, machines, land and buildings.” “The team,” said Mr McCarthy, "will spend the next two weeks, working through our forecasts and putting into detail what resources will be necessary to achieve them, in what stages, and the economic timing.” The report, due back with Feltex in about four months,

would put a price on future needs, and the Feltex management would then decide how and when to achieve the financial resources to bring about the expansion. “We aim not only to be bigger in terms of volume of ouptput, but to diversify in range,” said Mr McCarthy, “and to make available those advances in technology we are free to draw on, based on the world-wide experience of B. F. Goodrich. “Radial tyres, both for cars and trucks, is the main field we want to move into —based on our experience in the growing radial tyre market in Europe, where I have just spent three years.” Mr McCarthy said that in these aims it was hoped to achieve a market growth of 5 per cent a year. Exporting was extremely attractive in New Zealand because of the incentives offered by the Government. Every effort would be made to in the South Pacific, South-East Asia and in Australia.