SEOUL– Hankook Tire & Technology Co., the world’s sixth-largest tiremaker by sales, said Wednesday it shifted to net profit in the second quarter from a year earlier on increased sale of high-end products.
Hankook Tire swung to a net profit of 159.5 billion won (US$140 million) for the three months ended in June from a net loss of 4.6 billion won during the same period of last year, the company said in a statement.
“Robust sales of original equipment (OE) and replacement equipment (RE) tires in Europe and the United States drove the quarterly results,” a company spokesman said.
OE tires refer to the products a tiremaker supplies to the assembly lines of a carmaker at wholesale prices. It is more profitable for carmakers to sell RE tires in after-sales markets.
Operating profit more than doubled to 187.1 billion won in the second quarter from 70 billion won a year ago, while sales rose 32 percent to 1.81 trillion won from 1.36 trillion won during the same period.
Hankook Tire earns over 80 percent of its total revenue from abroad. It has eight plants — two in South Korea, one in Hungary, one in the United States, three in China and one in Indonesia — whose combined capacity reaches 102 million tires per year.
Source: Yonhap News Agency