In Tanzania, they are preparing to relaunch tire production

The government of Tanzania is seeking an investor to revive production at a tire factory in Arusha to meet demand in the country's and regional markets, reports The Citizen.

The plant plans to produce 1 million car tires, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Tanzania noted that investors will be able to rent the site for 33 years on condition of restoring production.

In 1969, the Tanzanian government, together with the American General Tire, founded the company GTEA (General Tyre East Africa), which in 1971 opened a plant with a capacity of 320,000 tires per year, and in 2007, production was stopped due to market saturation with cheap imported tires, mainly from China (by that time, General Tire itself had been acquired by the German Continental).

As part of its new initiative, the Tanzanian authorities are offering to install equipment at the plant for the production of a wide range of tires for passenger, light commercial, and heavy-duty vehicles, as well as buses. The ministry says that the revival of the enterprise will help reduce supplies from China, Japan, India, and the UAE, and notes that drivers complain about the low quality of imported tires, which, in their words, do not have sufficient strength for operation at high temperatures in African conditions and are not suitable for use on highways, primarily those connecting Tanzania with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda.

Currently, a tire plant in Africa is being built, for example, by the Chinese Sentury, which has decided to locate production in Morocco. The project will be invested with $490 million, and the capacity of the enterprise will be around 12 million tires per year.