Sumitomo (Falken) closing only N. American plant

It appears that Sumitomo is closing its only North American factory today, essentially putting 1500+ workers out of a job with virtually no notice. There are some severance packages and Union assistance being coordinated to relocate some employees, but the bulk are now jobless. I understand that businesses will do what they have to do to maintain the status quo and be profitable, however this blindside hit to its workers really sucks. Falken makes some great tires, but I think I'll be crossing them off my list of future purchases.

https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/erie-county/tonawanda/sumitomo-rubber-announces-plant-closure/

 

It's a valid way of thinking (as a consumer)

I think Canada produces some goodyears and michelins, but they have slimy practices as well.

I don't think stuff like this will ever improve with time. It's cheaper to outsource.

 

I saw this a couple days ago. I guess the value prop wasn’t there so maybe we’ll see off-shore tires with the Sumitomo brand. Or maybe the brand goes away?

And how about Vredstein committing to the US market? I ran some of these years ago, not the same as today’s tires but they were durable and great in the snow.

By the way, Falken is owned by Sumitomo. They created this as a “budget” brand.

 

I worked at the plant for 6 years, and left the company 7 months ago. Things haven’t been running the way they wanted in that plant since taking back ownership from Goodyear. When I started back in 2018 they wanted close to 10k tires a day out of the plant. By this year I believe those numbers were suppose to be somewhere between 14-17k. When I left in April, they were only around 6500-7k. Just a few days before closing the plant they sent out a message saying they hit 10k for a record. So if you do the math over the years they were millions of tires behind their goal.

The plant was plagued with multiple issues. While they did put a bunch of money into extremely old equipment and infrastructure (plant was over 100 years old) they put a lot of the money into the newer tire building machines and a new building housing a lot of the new machines. While they did do a lot of controls upgrades on some of the older stuff a lot of their equipment in stock prep was extremely old and worn out. Lots of bad batches of compounds and out of spec material caused production delays with the newer equipment. Lots of poor planning and decision making, poor training, high wages, work force issues, high material costs, cheap imported tires from china and other countries flooding the market, and many other factors. All these things just really crippled the place. The writing was on the wall, and the company warned the workforce many times that the plant wasn’t viable and losing lots of money each year. Many flyers were passed around, warning employees about the issues. Also during plant meetings, they would show us statistics/costs vs their other plants. The company was cautiously continuing investing in the place though right until the end. They were still having new equipment installed and finishing up upgrades. How every ultimately the board members and investors just knew it was a serious money pit.

They had 3 shutdowns this year at the plant. One while I was interviewing for my new job. They were down for 2-3 due to a cyber attack. Then again this past summer due to a major breakdown for a week. Then in October they issued a statement that they had warehousing issues and were gonna shut the plant down election week to clear out the warehouse. While they did have a bunch of semi tires in the warehouse they weren’t selling do to cheap imported tires from china, the warehouse wasn’t full and no production facility is gonna shut down over something like that. In fact a few years ago we had warehouse issues when they transitioned the warehouse to their own company instead of a contractor. They just piled tires all throughout the production floor wherever they could fix them. It was a mess, but they never fully stopped production. I know that them not keeping any maintenance workers in the plant during the shutdown was a huge red flag that something was gonna happen. They always had us in the plant when production wasn’t running and doing PM’s or other things. People were worried in the prior few weeks thinking something may happen. I don’t think many thought they would just up and lock the doors however. Most probably assumed because we were under contract, that if anything like that happened it would happen at contract time.

While I’m extremely thankful I got out when I did, I feel bad for all my fellow coworkers who lost their jobs. A lot of them are pissed at the company. However I can’t blame them. They lost almost a billion dollars over the course of about 10 years. They tried right up to the end to keep things running and continuing to sink money into the place. While there was always a cultural disconnect there being a Japanese company and trying to push some Japanese values upon the American union workers, they took better care of their employees than Goodyear did and would of in this situation. I’m extremely grateful for my time there. Not only did it enhance my career, it also created my new family. My wife and I met there and have a beautiful daughter from our time there together.
I wished that the plant could have been opened another 100 years. Hopefully someday they will reopen or at least produce tires here in the USA again.

 

Thanks for sharing such an amazing perspective from someone who was actually there. Most of us only get fed the information provided to us, but this helps to clarify some things, such as subtle warnings given many times over the past months and how they actually treated their staff better than Goodyear did. I'm definitely looking at all of this with a different lens now. Thanks again for sharing your experience working at this plant.

 

Thanks for the insight. Goodyear has been a crappy company since the mid 1980’s. They are the epitome of caring only about “shareholder value”. Their products have been mediocre at best since then as well.

Michelin on the other hand, seems to actually care about their products as well as their shareholders…not sure how they treat employees, but the few I’m acquainted with have been with them for a long time.

Having been involved with manufacturing for my entire adult life, this is nothing new. As the primary focus of companies remain only their greedy Wall Street shareholders, it will only get worse.

 

I took a bunch of pictures of some of the machinery in the departments I serviced while I worked in the plant. These were taken during the first production shutdown this year, when the plant got hacked and they wiped the servers. Production was shutdown for 2.5 weeks. I took them just before my interview at GM to maybe make a little portfolio. Now I guess I have some memories and stories I can share in the future.



Dept 172: MTR (Truck and Bus Radial)

Tire building machines












Bead winder:



Bead Wrapper:



Bead Apexer:



NZ Steel Cutter



VMI 90° Ply Cutter



VMI 90° ply cutter awler/windup:



VMI Steel cutter:





Moto bias ply Kevlar Cutter:



Moto bias ply let off and windup



Moto bias ply building machine/moto radial carcass



MOTO gear pump machine: (racing tires)




Manual bead apexer:


New bead winder:


Auto bead apexer:



Steelastic bead apexer:





VMI steel cutter: (PCR-light truck/car)


Fischer Kevlar cutter: (Moto)


VMI Edgiq steel cutter:







Moto bias ply cutter 2



PCR carcass building machine:


carcass cell conveyor


PCR radial machine: (applies steel breakers, JLB and tread)


JLB winder (jointless band Kevlar)


Mother Slitter: (takes large rolls (FP’s) and slits them)



New Fischer ply cutter:


gum station for Fischer ply cutter:


Ply centering and inspection table


Width detect and wind up


Fisher cutter blade:




Old bias cutter


Centering/monitoring station (detects bad splices, dog ears, misouts)



VMI Apexer


Fanuac robot to stack beads:




VMI Maxx tire building machine: (cars/truck)

Right side builds carcass, left side builds the package. Assembly in the center.





Ply stations/conveyors/cutters


Barcode robot


Main robot: (switches bead stackes, loads beads, grabs green tire and drops on upper conveyor)


Overhead conveyors from VMI build machines: runs through multiple builds back to paint machines.





LRS build machine (PCR dept)

 

I have to say I never had any Goodyears that I liked, either on my personal vehicle or ones that I have installed on my customers vehicles. My lifelong experience with Good Year has been shoddy quality in terms of uniformity (radial and lateral run out, road force issues and ridiculous amounts of weight to balance).
However, that has recently changed. The Canadian made set of Ultra Terrains I bought from Discount are some of the nicest AT tires I have ever had. Super smooth on the highway, balanced with minimal weight. Not just a fluke either, I persuaded a couple of other customers to try them and they are of outstanding quality.

Back on topic, my heart goes out to those affected. That’s a significant number of people kicked to the curb…..never mind so close to the holidays.

 

Thanks for sharing these, I watch tires being manufactured on YouTube and it’s fascinating to see.

 

Sad
These were my go to tires for years