RALEIGH, N.C. – A Chinese tiremaker is moving more aggressively into the U.S. market, announcing plans Tuesday for a North Carolina factory that is to eventually employ 800 and produce six million tires a year.
A state committee that administers large corporate tax breaks approved plans to coax Triangle Tire to rural Edgecombe County, about 65 miles (100 kilometers) east of the state capital of Raleigh. The $580 million plant is the first in the United States for the Weihai, China-based maker of tires for passenger vehicles, trucks and buses and heavy equipment.
“We expect that this will provide a huge boost in brand awareness and interest in our products as we continue to expand our presence in the U.S.,” Manny Cicero, CEO of the company’s Triangle Tire USA subsidiary, said in a statement.
Triangle Tire could get up to $152 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and other incentives if it meets hiring targets. The jobs are projected to pay an average wage of $56,450 a year, well above a county average of $32,642.
The company said in a disclosure to the Shanghai Stock Market last month that construction would start next year on a two-phase plan to first build a factory producing 5 million passenger cars a year. That would be followed by production lines churning out 1 million commercial vehicle tires a year. The company added that construction is expected to take two to three years for each project.
The Triangle factory marks at least the third Chinese tiremaker to build production plants in the U.S.
Wanli Tire Corp. said in June it plans to build a factory employing at least 400 people and later rising to 1,200 in South Carolina, America’s tire-producing capital. Sentury Tire announced plans in 2016 to develop a $530 million factory in LaGrange, Ga.
Triangle was the third-largest tire Chinese manufacturer based on 2015 global sales, according to Tire Business, an Akron, Ohio-based trade newspaper. Triangle ranked 17th among tire companies in worldwide sales, the newspaper estimated.
The plant is to be located on a nearly 1,500-acre (600-hectare) site between Rocky Mount and Tarboro, which was offered as a location to potential manufacturers needing lots of space by the economic development groups that assembled it. The site is near the major Interstate 95 road corridor and borders a CSX Transportation rail line. Triangle’s operation would use about 400 acres (160 hectares) of that site, state Commerce Department spokesman David Rhodes said.
Triangle Tire has exported to the U.S. market for more than two decades and established its U.S. subsidiary in Franklin, Tennessee, nearly two years ago, the company’s web site said.
Its parent company, Triangle Tyre Co. Ltd., manufactures more than 25 million tires a year that are sold in more than 180 countries. The company’s manufacturing systems are highly automated and the company is working on tires with built-in chips that monitor and collect information about road conditions, temperature and tire wear and damage.
Silly Chinese. Triangle tires won’t roll. They’ll just skid around like a bad asian driver.
I need a big tax break to do a farm update just if I could used someone else money to do it
Jobs jobs jobs…….. and a bowl of rice.
China pollutes in their country, they will do it here big time.when we have no more clean water or land, maybe people will wake up. Those 800 jobs? who do you think they are going to??? How much money do you think those people are going to pay employees? I want AMERICAN MADE PRODUCT! not foreign people making the product. even if the tires say american made, it is not!!!! Still made in china as far as i am concerned. they are sneaky as far as i am concerned , bring a company that is china owned to get american business. What about those chips in the tires???? Is this what trump meant by bringing jobs to AMERICA??????? They must think we are stupid or something!!!!!
Just in time for the wetback AMNESTY….Trump will brag that he’s created 800 American jobs, but of course, Americans need not apply for work there.
It’s probably just a matter of time before the land becomes the property of the People’s Republic of China, and unproductive workers are killed in the basement. No questions asked.
No thanks trump. Just a next step in non-nationalism. 50 plus years.