Why The Factory Isn’t Where South Africa Wins In The Mining Tyre Value Chain

Giant mining tyres are made in a handful of plants worldwide. That is not a South African failure – and it points to where a mining economy should actually be competing.

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.

This 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 build a plant there. It is how close we can get our engineering to the customer. That is where a manufacturer earns its place.”

So where is the value?

If manufacturing concentrates, the value that can be captured domestically sits everywhere else along the chain – and in mining tyres, that is a great deal. The same structure recurs across mining inputs, industrial equipment and specialised componentry: manufacturing consolidates globally, while service, engineering and distribution remain stubbornly local, and remain winnable.

It includes stockholding and distribution across a country this size, fitment, on-site technical service, performance monitoring, warranty handling, repair, retreading and end-of-life management. These are skilled roles, local by definition, and tied directly to whether the customer’s operation runs. Where an idle haul truck costs money every hour it stands, the service layer is not an accessory to the product. It is a substantial part of what the customer is buying.

What a partnership looks like when it’s built this way

Ascenso has entered the South African mining market not by opening an import office, but by partnering with Royal Tyres, a supplier established in Durban in 1939 and now in its 87th year. The division of labour is the point. Ascenso, founded in 2019, brings more than 1,200 tyre sizes, a 50-engineer research team and a new all-steel radial range. Royal Tyres brings nationwide distribution, long-standing relationships with mining and industrial operators, and hard-won knowledge of what Southern African conditions do to equipment.

“A tyre arriving in the country is the beginning of the work, not the end of it,” says Akshay Patel, CEO of Royal Tyres. “Getting it to a mine, fitting it, servicing it, monitoring how it wears and repairing it – that is where the skills sit, where the jobs sit, and where the customer relationship is earned or lost. We have been building that capability for 87 years. It cannot be imported in a container.”

Patel is direct about the choice facing operators. “Nobody manufactures these tyres here, so every mining operator in this country is buying an import, whichever name is on the sidewall. The real question is which manufacturer will invest in supporting that customer locally, rather than shipping product and moving on. That is what made this partnership worth doing.”

The part that flows the other way

There is a further layer of value that rarely features in localisation debates, and it runs outward rather than inward. Ascenso is deploying more than 15 field application engineers across key mining markets, working on customers’ sites to monitor tyre performance, analyse wear behaviour and record operating conditions. That data returns to the company’s research and development team and shapes the products it builds next. South African mining conditions – abrasive haul roads, high temperatures, heavy payloads and long cycles – are among the most punishing anywhere in the world.

“No laboratory reproduces a working mine,” says Mahansaria. “The only way to make a mining tyre better is to watch it work, in the hardest conditions you can find. South Africa is one of those places. What we learn on a mine site here goes into products sold in a hundred countries, which means South African operating experience shapes equipment used across the world.”

A South African mine, on this reading, is not simply a customer at the end of a global supply chain. It is an input into how that chain designs its products.

The question worth asking

Localisation debates gravitate towards factories because factories are visible, countable and politically legible. But where manufacturing concentrates globally for hard economic reasons, holding out for the plant can mean neglecting the parts of the chain a country can genuinely own, and where the skilled employment actually is. The more productive question is not what we can build here, but which links in each value chain are winnable, and whether we are investing seriously enough in those.

In mining tyres, the answer is clear enough: The factory was never going to be here – nearly everything after it can be.