Apollo Tyres acquires land on lease in Laos for rubber plantation
12 Aug 2011
The shortage of natural rubber for its domestic tyre manufacturing has forced Apollo Tyres Ltd to acquire 10,000 hectares of land on lease in Laos for rubber plantation.
Apollo Tyres requires 1,300 tonnes of rubber daily to manufacture 30 million truck, car and farm equipment tyres per annum.
Onkar S Kanwar, chairman and managing director, Apollo Tyres Ltd, said that the objective to acquire land abroad on lease is to meet 25 per cent of the company's requirement as security in the next five years.
Kanwar said Apollo was the first Indian tyre maker to acquire a property for cultivating rubber, which would take between two and seven years to be tapped from.
The tyre industry in India is passing through a crisis on account of increase in raw material prices and shortage of natural rubber. At present there is a shortage of 2 lakh tonnes of rubber and the industry has been lobbying the government to allow duty-free imports of rubber, he told reporters after a meeting of the company's board of directors.
Kanwar said Apollo proposes to invest Rs500 crore this fiscal to augment its production capacity in India and abroad. Of this Rs500crore, a 6 million euros (pproximately Rs38-39 crore) would be invested in Europe and $30 million (Rs138-139 crore) in South Africa and the remaining in India.