Our key products are the industrial tyres, the solid tyres as well as press-on band 
tyres;
the brands are the 'bomb cart', 'Performer',
'Globestar'
'Peakmaster' and the 'Ultimate'. It's used in
the railroad trailers,
the terminal trailers and the forklift machines as well.
Our key markets are currently in Rotterdam,
Netherlands, Belgium, in the US in Long
Beach, San Pedro,
in Seattle and in Asia its in Singapore and
that's extremely
recent. The main test that we undergo is
the endurance test which is a tyre test
machine
but as we're an ISO 9001:2008 company
a raw material is tested for rheological
properties
and the compound once its produced is also tested
and once the tyres are built, it goes to an
ultrasonic test
to see the air bubbles inside the tyres
and also we do hardness testing
to see the curing properties of the tyre;
and finally
the endurance test is done which is a
destructive test
to ensure that the tyre heat build-up is
checked as well as the lifetime of the
tyre.
The 2008 downturn
I think is a critical moment for us to
understand about capacity management.
Industrial tyre manufacturers such as
ourselves
operate capacity based on supply and
demand and
based on what we've learned through the
2008 recession
and coming out of it I think capacity
management is the key tool that we need
to understand.
Besides that is the over-reliance on the
key markets of the
world. So the constant focus on markets
such as Europe and the USA
I think there should be far more
diversification looking at the brick
areas - for example Brazil, Russia, India,
China
I think those are important and I think
that's one of the key lessons we've learnt.
We're always affected by cheaper products emanating 
from the far east specially, but Sri Lanka is the largest producer of industrial tyres in
the world
and Sri Lanka has 60% of the
global market of the
industrial tyre business, so you talk about
port applications
you need to send your tyres through
rigorous testing and you need a
high-performance products,
so even if the price is cheaper, if it does
not perform
in the application then nobody can have
access to that market
so due to that we feel that our products coming from 
the GRI factory is far superior than any
other product that comes out.
Our key growth areas right now are basically
the Middle-East, Russia, Asia, South
America
and South Africa and that tends to be
because we've been over-
resilient with the large economies such
as the United States
and Europe. The major challenge, or I guess, the single biggest challenge we face
in supplying tyres to container terminals is the
time period that they have the contracts
for; the contracts typically run anything 
from two to three years
so when you look at the rigorous testing
which is involved which can take
anything from six months to nine months
and a contract period which is locked with
somebody else from two to three years -
that's single biggest challenge we face.
