Yokohama Tire Corporation is the North American manufacturing and marketing arm of Tokyo, Japan-based The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd., a global manufacturing and sales company of premium tires since 1917. Servicing an extensive sales network throughout the U.S., Yokohama Tire Corporation is a leader in technology and innovation. The company's complete product line includes tires for high-performance, light truck, passenger car, commercial truck and bus, and off-the-road mining and construction applications.
Our Grand Design 100 medium-term management plan outlined efforts to expand our tire production capacity. When Yokohama adopted the plan in 2006, authoritative projections called for an average annual growth of 100 million tires in global demand. From that moment forward, we have been determined to accommodate that growth and provide better service for our customers.
In April 2013, we announced and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the State of Mississippi to build a plant in the city of West Point to produce truck and bus tires that will total up to one million units a year. In September 2013, just five months after the announcement, we broke ground on the $300 million investment covering over 500 acres of land.
Meanwhile, expansions had previously been completed at our Salem, Virginia manufacturing plant where we now produce ultra-high performance, high-performance and touring passenger car tires as well as light truck tires in our 1.2 million square-foot facility. Products manufactured at that location include our flagship brand ADVAN®, GEOLANDAR®, S.drive® and AVID® tires that include the Ascend, incorporating our breakthrough orange oil technology.
We are now proud to announce that as of October 2015 the facility in Mississippi is also fully functional, insuring that the growth of the Yokohama brand in North America will now be served by two factories, right here in the U.S.A.
We at Yokohama are committed to achieving sustainable growth as a global organization and we are grateful to have earned your trust as our customer.
$300 MILLION INVESTMENT
A little over two years after we announced and broke ground on a new manufacturing plant for commercial truck tires in West Point, Mississippi, the facility is now rolling tires off the production line. Construction on the 500+ acres of land and production capacity when fully actualized will manufacture up to 1 million tires annually. What does this mean to you?
Since our entry into the U.S. market over 40 years ago, along with the subsequent acquisition of our plant in Salem, Virginia in the 1980’s, Yokohama has experienced steady growth. Now, with our Mississippi plant—which is the first Yokohama plant built in the U.S.—we can create even stronger strategic partnerships with our customers. We invite you to see how our vision came to life in the photos below.
Established: January, 1984 with 10 employees and a distribution center in Burnaby, B.C. Yokohama Tire (Canada) Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yokohama Corporation of North America, Santa Ana, CA, USA.
Philosophy: Equipping vehicles with advanced tire technology enhances dynamic vehicle control for the maximum in active safety and driving satisfaction.
Facilities: Yokohama Tire (Canada) Inc. corporate headquarters is in Langley, B.C. and regional offices with distribution centers across Canada. Western Zone: Langley, BC; Central Zone: Brampton, ON; and Eastern Zone: Montreal, QC.
Consumer Tires: passenger vehicle, including cars and mini-vans, light truck and sport utility, ultra high and high performance, winter, and motorsport applications.
Commercial Tires: light truck utility, medium and heavy truck, bus, earth mover and off-the-road, industrial, and specialty applications.
Dealer Network: Consumer Tires are available at over 700 independent tire dealer locations and well over 2,000 retail locations. Commercial Tires are available at over 300 independent tire and fleet servicing dealers.
YOKOHAMA also operates within Mexico along with about 120 other countires. Over the past century, we have accumulated technologies that have led us to the creation of high-performance tires for all categories of vehicles, from compact cars, to sports cars, high-powered sedans, and road equipment. large construction. We have also developed original equipment tires for many leading car manufacturers in the world. After participating in a wide variety of sports motorsport competitions, we have accumulated knowledge about the tire performance of each type of car in each motorsport category. We are especially proud of our flagship brand: "ADVAN".
The Yokohama Rubber Co. Ltd. is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of rubber products, offering an extensive range of tire, rubber and adhesive products. Established in 1917, Yokohama Rubber has expanded its worldwide business scope with a lineup of high-technology products meeting customer needs in the fields of automobiles, civil engineering, construction, marine engineering, aerospace and sporting goods.
Yokohama Rubber employs 13,500 people worldwide.
Today, Yokohama is reinforcing its global structure through state-of-the-art production centers in Japan, other Asian countries and North America, and through a sales network covering these areas and Europe.
Balanced and Active Play is essential and elemental to enable children to thrive.
Through play, children learn to think, communicate and be creative. They develop language and motor skills. They learn to engage and get along with others—whether with their friends, playmates and families. Play, in all its forms, is a powerful thing. From addressing obesity, and improving mental health and wellness, to building a creative and successful workforce—balanced and active play lays the foundation for a skilled, healthy, resilient, and successful society.
Yet, for the 16 million children growing up in poverty in the United States, access to active and balanced play is not always possible. Especially in low-income communities across the country, there can be a lack of playground infrastructure, equipment or play resources
This is why Yokohama Tire Corporation is proud to partner with KaBOOM!, the national non-profit organization dedicated to the bold new goal of ensuring that all children get the balanced and active play they need to thrive. Together, we look forward to empowering communities by creating and catalyzing great places to play, as well as educating and elevating the societal conversation about the importance of play in children’s lives.
As a major sponsor of the Yokohama Tire LPGA Classic, Yokohama was proud to designate KaBOOM! as the Charity of Choice for the Classic starting in 2014. KaBOOM! will continue to be the recipient of proceeds from the Classic in 2015 and 2016 to help make new playgrounds a reality for children to enjoy for years to come.
In April 2015, Yokohama Tire Corporation and KaBOOM! partnered with Habitat for Humanity of Orange County to build the first playground right here in the city of San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. On April 22, more than 200 volunteers from Yokohama, the community and Habitat for Humanity of Orange County joined forces to give kids the childhood they deserve by building a new playground in a single day! In just six hours and with all of us working together, a playground rose, bringing more than 1,300 kids in San Juan Capistrano one step closer to having the childhood they deserve.
And that was just the beginning! Yokohama Tire Corporation looks forward to building two more playgrounds in the next two years. We hope to continue working with everyone in selecting future build sites and making kids’ dreams a reality. Together, we truly can make a difference.
In our Tire Group and in our Multiple Business Group, we develop products with an eye to reducing the output of greenhouse gases and other environmentally-burdensome substances and to conserving material and energy. We evaluate products in regard to four environmental criteria: prevention of global warming, resource recycling, resource saving, and safety and comfort.
Our guidelines mandate that all new products achieve an aggregate improvement of at least 5% over existing products and that they at least match existing products in regard to all four criteria. By the end of 2013, 93% of our products fulfilled our criteria for minimizing environmental impact, and we aim to increase that percentage to 100% by the end of 2017.
Taking part in efforts to forestall global warming is an important part of fulfilling our corporate social responsibility. We have therefore established a panel of experts to oversee such initiatives as installing cogeneration systems, shifting to cleaner fuels, and conserving energy throughout our operations. Our medium-term target in Japan is to reduce our annual greenhouse emissions 25% by 2020, compared with 1990. In 2013, our overall reduction reached 16%. Our long-term target worldwide is to reduce our output of carbon dioxide more than 50% across our entire value chain by 2050, compared with 2005.
Our Grand Design 100 medium-term management plan includes targets for reducing landfill waste at our plants. The principal targets in Phase III of that plan—2012 to 2014—are to reduce annual landfill waste at our Japanese plants 35%, compared with 2006, and to reduce landfill waste per unit of production (by value) at least 1% annually at our plants worldwide. We achieved our year-on-year reduction targets for 2013 in Japan, reducing our landfill waste 11%, to 15,134 tons, and reducing landfill waste per unit of production 13%. Our efforts to achieve further reductions in 2014 center on reducing interim-product and product scrap.
In the United States, at our Yokohama Tire Manufacturing Virginia (YTMV) plant, YTMV has been focused on reducing the amount of waste that is sent to the landfill. Sending zero percent of waste to the landfill is the ultimate goal at Yokohama and tremendous strides have been taken in 2014 to help make this a realization. Some activities that have influenced the drop in landfill percentages this year include a recycling program in the offices and plant floor and sending non-recyclable trash to an incinerator which is converted from waste into an energy recovery resource.
In 2014 additionally, YTMV was inducted into the Virginia Environmental Excellence Program (VEEP) under an E4 status. The “E4” status is the highest status that a facility can achieve in the program. As part of the program, Yokohama will be encouraged to make environmental sustainability part of the culture through leadership, innovation and continual improvement. Areas of continuous improvements will be energy efficiency, water resource management, chemical management and environmental awareness.
In 2015, YTMV received the Environmental Warrior Award presented by the Virginia Water Environment Association (VWEA) as part of WVEA’s 2015 Industrial Waste and Pretreatment Environmental Excellence Awards Program. The Environmental Warrior Award is a new award presented for the first time in 2015 to the company that has made the greatest improvement in their environmental compliance program.
YTMV is ISO 14001-certified, which is an international specification of environmental management system that holds organizations to stringent environmental principles and audits.
It is our expectation that our Mississippi plant will meet or exceed all of the same environmental achievements that YTMV has.