MATERIALS HANDLING
Why the factory isn’t where South Africa wins in the mining tyre value chain There is no factory in South Africa that makes the tyres on a mining haul truck. There is also no such factory in Australia, Canada, Chile or Norway. Between them those countries move a substantial share of the world’s ore, and not one of them manufactures the giant all-steel radial tyres their mines depend on.
Akshay Patel, CEO of Royal Tyres.
CEO panels drew high engagement and reasserted Indaba as a stage for thought leadership.
T his matters more here than in most places. South African mining contributed R477 billion to GDP in 2025 and turned over R1.2 trillion, according to the Minerals Council South Africa, employing more than 470 000 people directly. Every one of those operations runs on equipment that runs on tyres, and not one of those tyres is made here. Giant off-the-road tyres are made in very few places on earth, for reasons unrelated to any country’s industrial capability. Once that is understood, a more useful question opens up: if the factory was never realistically going to be here, where in this value chain should a mining economy be competing? Why giant tyres concentrate globally The constraint is scale. A plant capable of manufacturing large specialised all-steel radial tyres at significant scale is a highly specialised, capital-intensive facility needing a very substantial
market to justify itself. Ascenso Tyres, an Indian off- highway manufacturer, has committed more than US$100 million to exactly this capability at a single plant in Gujarat, serving customers in more than 100 countries. No national mining market, South Africa’s included, generates the volume to support such a facility alone. That is why nobody has built one here, and why the established global brands haven’t either. The input economics reinforce it: rubber, steel cord and specialty chemicals are largely imported anyway, so shipping raw materials in to build a product that must then be exported adds cost and carbon rather than removing them. Yogesh Mahansaria, Managing Director of Ascenso Tyres, puts the logic plainly. “An investment of this size only works if it serves the world. What we have built in Gujarat supplies operators in more than a hundred countries, and no single market, however important, could support it alone. So, the question we ask in each market is not whether to
Yogesh Mahansaria, Managing Director of Ascenso Tyres.
38 MODERN MINING www.modernminingmagazine.co.za | November 2026
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker