To fully meet the demand for tires in the U.S., the country relies on imports, especially from Asian countries. In 2022, the U.S. imported around 32 million units of passenger car tires from Thailand and about 17.3 million units from Indonesia.
Tire market segments
The most used tires around the world today can be categorized under the pneumatic segment: they operate with air or gas under pressure. Their primary purposes are to provide traction between the vehicle and the road as well as shock absorption for impact.Tires can be further categorized based on the type of vehicle they’re used for and whether they’re used on new vehicles coming from the factory - known as original equipment (OE) - or serving as a replacement for such tires.
Replacement passenger car tires are the leading segment with shipments of 216,100 units in 2022. In the same year, some 41.5 million units of OE passenger car tires were shipped in the U.S., an increase of nearly 11 percent compared with 2021. However, the 2022 volume was still about eight percent lower compared with 2019, showing that the recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic has been relatively slow.
Leading companies
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is among the key tire makers headquartered in the U.S. Goodyear reported a revenue of more than 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2021 and ranked third in the list of largest tire producers in the world. The Japanese multinational corporation Bridgestone was the global leader in tire manufacturing in 2021 with a revenue of around 30 billion U.S. dollars. Michelin, a France-based manufacturer, ranked second with a revenue of over 28 billion U.S. dollars in the same year.
