Continental Breaks Ground on Huge Tire Plant in Mississippi

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Continental tire plant rendering

Clinton, Miss.—Continental Tire the Americas, a division of Continental Corp., has officially broken ground on the first phase of what will ultimately be a $1.4 billion tire plant in Hinds County, Miss., off of I-20, 2 miles from Clinton and 20 miles from Jackson, the multinational company announced late last week.

The greenfield site covers nearly 1,000 acres, and the plant will employ 2,500 people when it reaches full capacity.

Continental expects that physical construction of the plant will not begin till 2018, however, a gap that results from a great deal of necessary site preparation work, including grading, Kathryn Blackwell, the company’s vice president of communications and marketing, North America, told Commercial Property Executive.

For Phase I, more than 600 acres are being cleared, involving more than 4 million cubic yards of dirt being moved. The building footprint for the first phase is more than 700,000 square feet.

Machine installation will start in March 2019, while the building is still under construction, and the production of commercial vehicle tires is planned to start by the end of that year. All construction activities for the plant are expected to be finished by the end of 2021.

Nikolai Setzer

“Building this new facility in Mississippi is a critical part to our growth strategy for Continental Tire,” said Nikolai Setzer, a member of Continental’s Executive Board & head of Continental’s global tire business, said in a prepared statement. “This is the first new plant, globally, for the truck tire business in more than ten years.”

“We have added capacity over the past 5–10 years at our existing truck tire plants,” Blackwell added. “Sales in the U.S. have grown significantly enough to now warrant the added capacity a new plant brings.”

The architect and general contractor have not yet been chosen for this project, she said.

Not including this plant in Mississippi, Continental reportedly has invested nearly $2.5 billion in the past decade for manufacturing, technology, facilities and product development to grow its tire business in the Americas.

As part of that, in September 2015 ground was broken on a $500 million expansion of a tire plant in Sumter, S.C. The expansion will approximately double production capacity there, from 4 million tires a year to 8 million. Kajima Building & Design Group Inc. is the general contractor.

Rendering courtesy of Continental