• First piling blessing ceremony at the greenfield site according to Thai culture
• Plans to complete the civil works by mid of 2018
• Greenfield tire plant will start production in 2019 and create 900 new jobs 

The technology company Continental and one of the leading global tire manufacturer celebrated today the First Piling Ceremony at its Greenfield tire plant site at Rayong, Thailand. The € 250 million investment in the new Greenfield Passenger and Light Truck Tires plant of Continental at Rayong, Thailand, was announced earlier this year and it will produce around 4.0 million passenger and light truck tires per year for Thailand and the whole APAC region. The first piling ceremony was organized according to local Thai culture and was led by Buddhist pharm who inaugurated the first piling laying foundation. The blessing ceremony should bring success to the project, the construction team and all involved and it marks the start of civil works at the site.

Members of the Continental project team of the Greenfield Tire Plant in Rayong during the first piling ceremony with Buddhist pharm. 

Michael Egner, Project Leader of the Greenfield Tire Plant Rayong, Thailand

“The first piling ceremony represents the initial milestone in the start of civil works at the site for the new Greenfield Passenger and Light Truck Tires plant of Continental at Rayong, Thailand. I am honored to have the local pharm here at site and I would like to express my sincere ‘thank you’ for this first initial milestone, to the industrial park Hemaraj management, our local suppliers as well as our engineering team at Continental who have made the on-time start of piling foundation laying possible”, declared Michael Egner, the project leader.

“For this Greenfield plant we need to construct more than 2,500 piles with a depth of up to 14m in the ground. The piles are required to anchor the buildings in the soil. Once this is completed we will be ready to prepare the building foundations and to start the main construction works” highlighted Matthias Weiland, Technical Project Manager of the Rayong Greenfield tires plant.

The site for Continental’s new Greenfield tire plant in the Province of Rayong complies with all requirements. It is close to the targeted markets and customers, offers a good infrastructure with only 140 km distance to the city of Bangkok, offers a deep-sea port in Laem Chabang at 60 km distance, and universities with a technical profile located nearby. The size of the site is about 750,000 m² which potentially allows an expansion to up to 25 million tires capacity per year.