Treading The World

Angelo Noronha, president, APAC & MEA, Alliance Tire Group (ATG), has worked studiously and now is a strong contender in the global market.

- Jayashree Mendes

Brief us into the history of Alliance Tire Group.

Better known as ATG now, we began operations close to 10 years ago with the acquisition of Israel based Alliance Tire Company in 2007 and US based GPX in 2009 which owned the popular Galaxy and Primex brands. Alliance was already a strong player in the agriculture segment in Europe and Galaxy was segment leader in the US, that’s how we managed to get a solid foothold in the diverse off road tyre industry.

Soon after, we built two plants in India—Tirunelveli (2009) and a second one in Dahej (2012-13). Importantly, as a 10-year old company, we acquired companies that were already 50-60 years old in the industry. Both these companies brought in their own domain expertise and offered us knowledge in the respective markets they were present in and that became a perfect fit for us. Driven by a very able entrepreneur Yogesh Mahansaria who scaled up the business from $150 million to a $500 million company when we were acquired by Yokohama in 2016.

Overall, we are a good blend of old and new, because most of the employees from Alliance and GPX continued to stay with us. So we are well embedded within geographies, cultures and also across various segment profiles. What further strengthens us is that the acquisitions not only gave us a strong foothold in the US and European markets but also in terms of segment superiority. Alliance is a strong player in agriculture, while Galaxy has a good hold in construction. Over a period of time, we’ve built up the team, encouraged and nurtured talent across geographies and today we are 4000 people. In 2016, Yokohama, one of the largest tire companies in the world acquired us and now we are on a new journey of growth, aiming to touch $1 billion turnover by 2020.

How did the Japanese connection come in considering you have been playing in European and US markets?