What happened here?
I’ve read a few things, but no explanation for the lightning quick close.
My company is involved with a company that works out of the plant. Can’t go into too much detail publicly but it definitely hit them as a shock and we’re now scrambling to help them out.
From what I read it sounds like typical NY/US/Inflation related stuff. Too expensive to make a tire in NY so Sumitomo Rubber Industries (The international parent company) is dissolving Sumitomo Rubber USA (the US company that is basically just the Tonawanda plant) and getting out of the US. Sounds like the plant has been on notice about costs for a while. A little surprising since they put 120 something million into the plant in 2022, but I guess when your parent company is worth 8.3 billion cutting your losses on a 120 million dollar investment isn’t that large a line item.
They are one of my biggest customers too. 20+ million cubic feet of nitrogen a month and about 20 tons of CO2. I was informed they were taking a maintenance shutdown from the 4th to the 11th. Then my contact at the plant told what’s going on. As far as the 12-24 month “wind down” that the news is saying. Unfortunately that is false and they are stopping production effective immediately.
That sucks.
That is small N-plant volumes. You need to convert your customers to small on-site life
I have put larger plants at Toyo, Bridgestone, and Goodyear down south.
We like tire customers.
(I’m not impacted, parted ways in 2021) Former tire design engineer for said company (almost 14 years).
I could write a book, but I’ll keep it short. Yeah, it was a small plant, but the ONLY plant for OE Harley Davidson (their declining sales year over year) and motorcycle race.
- 2008-2014 tire development, oversaw EVERY motorcycle tire build, new product industrialization. Harley Davidson OE, Sportmax, AMA / Motoamerica race. Cool shit was hand building tires that were outside of manufacturing equipment parameters, waiting 30 minutes for it to cure “cook”, and driving it directly to FedEx airport to get tested the next day.
- 2014-2017 nerdy FEA computer shit, had A LOT of freedom to come up with crazy designs, and A LOT of room to experiment. Sportmax Q3 to Q3+ made a tire that was faster (at least 1 second a lap), used less material (cheaper), lasted longer and used existing tooling. Applied some of that design into race product that was in turn faster. (Can’t take all the credit as there is a team effort). Came up with a really crazy front tires design, tested well, but was never implimented…
- 2017-2021 passenger car and light truck design, did some stuff… but not as much freedom as the motorcycle days.
I guess riding bitch on a liter bike around COTA at 190+ mph was cool too.
Not surprised by the closing as it was warned while I was still there. Disappointed by how it was handled (without knowing all the details).
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Wow thats awesome, ive always run the dunlop Q tires. 
I’m guessing since in previous threads you worked with banks that it is the credit union. It’s a separate entity, but, physically located on Sumitomo property. According to FB they are trying to setup a remote site to help their customers. That is crazy, security in tactical gear, nope, can’t do your banking here…
Global labor competition. We can’t compete.
not yet…
i think humanoid robots change that in the next 20 years, especially if we(usa) leads it
What will be the impact on the local economy?
Tonawanda taxes are going up.
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Report on the news is that it had nothing to do with politics. Happy to see they cleared that up as so many were saying it was because of Trump being elected. (Made not sense as he still had about 2 months before taking office and no tariffs would be in place at least until that time) So clearly not politically motivated by the presidential race.
Living in Kenmore/Tonawanda, I’m not excited about this in the least. 1550 employees were paying taxes into this town, the business was paying taxes into this town. We just took away all of that tax revenue, along with the one that was coming from Tonawanda Coke as well. I don’t see this being a good thing for Tonawanda and the need to make up the loss in tax.
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I see they’re holding a career fair, and we have a couple of their electrical engineers interviewing here this week.