Goodyear Announces: Production Stop!

After intensively adjusting capacity in many places worldwide, Goodyear Tires pressed the "pause button" again. Recently, Goodyear announced its Izmit factory in Turkey will stop production for one month from July 2 to August 2, expected to resume production on August 3.

Goodyear officials stated this production stop aims to conduct inventory management and planned regular maintenance. During this period, production lines will undergo technical adjustments and modernization, which will not negatively impact operations and finances, nor affect employee rights. However, the timing of this production stop is quite delicate - only a week has passed since the factory was heavily fined 672 million Turkish Lira by the Turkish government for violating anti-monopoly laws. It is worth noting that the factory also stopped production for a month in June 2025 citing "inventory adjustment".

Giants Deep in Adjustment Pain, Closures and Layoffs Follow

The production stop of Goodyear's Turkish factory is merely a microcosm of the severe turbulence in the global tire industry. Since 2026, international tire giants have frequently experienced a "shutdown wave":

In May, Bridgestone suddenly announced the closure of its Taiwan Hsinchu factory, which had operated for over 40 years; that same month, Pirelli's Argentina factory announced a production stop. The factory has cumulatively laid off 700 people since 2023; Continental also announced adjustments to about 3,000 positions globally, with 1,600 of them included in the layoff scope.

As a century-old giant, Goodyear's own "adjustment pain" is more intense. Under the "Goodyear Forward" restructuring plan, it has successively closed or sold factories in Fulda, Germany (operating 125 years), Kariega, South Africa (operating 78 years), Shah Alam, Malaysia, and other locations, and sold non-core businesses such as the Dunlop brand and chemicals. In April this year, Goodyear's only old OTR engineering tire factory in the US, Topeka, also implemented a temporary work stoppage.

Asian Low-Price Tire Impact, Global Competition Intensifies

Behind this wave of global production stoppage and factory closures lies supply-demand imbalance and the strong impact of high cost-performance tires from Asia (particularly China).

In recent years, Chinese tire enterprises have been conquering the world with cost-performance advantages, striking directly into the heart of foreign brand markets, making their original high-price positioning unsustainable and compressing profit margins significantly. Goodyear financial data shows its full-year net sales in 2025 decreased year-on-year by nearly 5% to 18.3 billion US dollars, with a net loss as high as 1.7 billion US dollars; global sales in Q1 2026 are expected to decrease by about 10% year-on-year, facing cost increase pressure of 185 million US dollars.

Facing capacity redundancy in high-cost areas and price impacts from Asian tires, international giants are forced to "cut arms to survive" to reduce costs and stop losses. Goodyear expects its restructuring plan to save about 300 million US dollars in costs annually. However, in the global tire market where competition far exceeds expectations, whether this "scraping bone to cure disease" type of self-rescue can bring about true revival still needs time to verify.