BDE Looking into Tire Production in Mindanao
Department of Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol said in a Facebook post that the government is having talks with a Finland-based tire manufacturer on plans to put up a $200 million tire factory in Mindanao to produce ‘Pilipinas Tires’ by the year 2020. The tires will be made of locally-produced natural rubber from farms in Mindanao, Basilan, Palawan and Negros Oriental. Once operational, the facility will be able to produce 4 million tires per year which is translated to an estimated P24 billion in annual revenues. For Piñol, this is a big help for the Filipino rubber farmers and workers.
Piñol further said that executives of the BLack Donuts Engineering (BDE) visited the country this week to look into the domestic rubber industry which is about 150,000 hectares of rubber farms and mainly owned by small farmers.
The BDE executives, with its president and CEO Kai Hauvala and sales director Tomi Pekkola, went around rubber plantations and processing facilities and looked for potential areas for factory location sites in Southern Mindanao. They said that they will be furnishing an assessment report to Secretary Piñol before they depart on Friday.
Factories put up by BDE through a build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme are already operational in India, Africa, China and Indonesia. If plans will push through for Pilipinas Tires, the company will partner with the government and the farmers who will form a corporation.
