The Rerouted Tyre
This is a study of the global trade in new tyres: who exports them, who buys them, and how import duties have redrawn that map since 2018. The finding is simple. Duties have not reduced the trade. They have moved it, creating new supplier countries and removing old ones within a few years. Europe imposed new duties on Chinese tyres in July 2026, so the map is about to move again. This article shows how, using the trade filings of every country on both sides of every route.
Since 2018, governments have repeatedly raised duties on imported tyres, and the trade has not shrunk once. World exports grew 22.5 percent to a peak of $98.8 billion in 2023. The trade moved instead. China's sales to the US fell by about two thirds while its total exports grew 47 percent. Cambodia went from no tyre exports to $1.21 billion of US sales in four years. Chinese tyres replaced Western supply in Russia within two. Every duty change redrew the map; none of them reduced it.
Europe's July 2026 duties on Chinese tyres start the same cycle in the EU. Three moves are already visible in the data:
- 01Suppliers already selling to the EU gain first: Vietnam, India, Thailand, Korea.
- 02Production moves inside or next to Europe. Serbia already hosts Chinese-owned capacity.
- 03Displaced Chinese tyres go to markets outside the duty wall, including the UK.
Then regulators follow the flows. For financiers, the main risk is a rule change mid-shipment, and the new routes will need working capital first.
The pattern
The same sequence repeats across eight years of data. A government raises tyre duties. Shipments from the targeted country fall. The gap is filled, either by other supplier countries or by new factories in countries the duties do not cover. Total trade keeps growing. The cost and the risk move to whoever finances the goods along the new route.
That last step is why the pattern matters. Tyres tie up cash for a long time. Distributors typically hold 60 to 90 days of stock, and shipping from Asian factories to Western ports takes another 30 to 45 days. From factory gate to fitted vehicle, the money is committed for roughly 90 to 135 days, usually financed in stages: credit from the supplier at origin, freight and insurance while the goods are at sea, and unpaid invoices at destination. When a government changes a duty rate, the extra cost falls on whoever holds the goods at that moment.
And duty rates have changed often. Duties are extra import taxes. The two main kinds in this story are antidumping duties, applied to goods judged to be sold at unfairly low prices, and countervailing duties, applied to goods judged to be subsidized by their home government. Since 2018 the United States has placed both kinds, along with broader tariffs, on tyres from China, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. South Africa placed duties on Chinese tyres and then, in 2025, provisional duties on three more countries after finding that Chinese tyres were being routed through them. On July 7, 2026, the European Commission imposed final anti-dumping duties of 4.3 to 45.3 percent on Chinese passenger-car and light-lorry tyres. The two largest import markets in the world have now both raised the cost of Chinese tyres.
Through all of this, the trade kept growing: world exports were $80.7 billion in 2018 and $98.8 billion in 2023, the most recent year with near-complete filings. So the question is not whether the trade survives duties. It clearly does. The question is who ships to whom afterwards, because that is where the financing risk moves. The rest of the article covers four cases: the United States, Cambodia, Russia, and Europe. It closes with Germany, which competes on value rather than volume and sits largely outside the pattern.
What HS 4011 covers
Every figure in this article covers HS 4011, new pneumatic tyres of rubber: passenger, truck and bus, aircraft, motorcycle, bicycle, agricultural, and other new tyres. Retreaded and used tyres (HS 4012) and inner tubes (HS 4013) are excluded. Where an outside source uses a narrower definition, such as the EU regulation, which covers passenger and light-lorry tyres only, the difference is stated.
How the data was read
The dataset is the UN Comtrade Plus bulk extract for HS 4011, 2018 to 2025, in both directions: what exporters reported shipping (FOB values) and what importers reported receiving (CIF values, which include freight and insurance). The two sides were matched for every country pair. World-total rows and sub-breakdown rows were removed before summing, so nothing is counted twice. Each figure below states which side it comes from.
Russia stopped filing trade data after 2021. Russian export figures from 2022 onward are rebuilt from the other side of each route: the sum of what every importing country reported buying from Russia. In 2018 to 2021, when both sides filed, this rebuilt figure sits 5 to 15 percent above Russia's own numbers, which is the normal gap for freight and insurance. That close match gives confidence in the method. Fewer countries have filed for recent years, so the later figures understate the true total and are described as minimums.
Two timing caveats apply throughout. For 2024, 127 exporting countries had filed when this data was pulled, against 152 for 2023, so 2024 figures are working estimates that will rise as filings arrive. 2025 filings are still arriving; 2025 figures appear only where the reporting country files completely and promptly, such as the United States, EU member states, and Germany.
Where China's tyres go now
The US market
The first case is the United States. It is the largest tyre buyer in the world: between 2018 and 2023 it imported $103.3 billion of new pneumatic tyres, 1.54 billion units on its own filings, about 2.4 times second-placed Germany's $42.8 billion. Access to this market depends on duty rates, and those rates have changed several times in eight years.
The sequence of US actions runs as follows. Duty orders on Chinese passenger tyres date from 2015, and on Chinese truck and bus tyres from the late 2010s; later reviews have kept them in place. In July 2021, antidumping orders followed on passenger tyres from Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and a countervailing duty order on Vietnam. In December 2024, an antidumping order took effect on truck and bus tyres from Thailand, with final rates of 48.39 percent for the largest examined producer and 12.33 percent for all others. In 2025, a new US tariff program, the reciprocal tariff framework, raised rates on the remaining low-duty Asian countries, including Cambodia.
The trade data moves in step with each action. China supplied 16.4 percent of US tyre imports in 2018. By 2024 its share was 4.3 percent, and in 2025, on complete US filings, 3.0 percent. Chinese shipments to the US fell from $2.50 billion to $0.61 billion over those eight years. Thailand moved the other way. It became the largest supplier and held the position through its own duty orders, reaching $4.01 billion and a 19.6 percent share in 2025. On Thailand's own export filings, its US shipments peaked in 2024 at $3.56 billion; on the US import filings, the peak year was 2022 at $4.10 billion. The difference is normal: the two sides record shipments at different times and different values. Vietnam roughly tripled its US shipments between 2018 and 2025, and Mexico more than doubled. One new supplier stands out: Cambodia, which exported no tyres at all until 2022.
Who supplies America
| Origin | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 8-Yr Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thailand | 2.37 | 2.98 | 3.02 | 3.42 | 4.10 | 3.56 | 3.94 | 4.01 | 27.41 |
| Mexico | 0.89 | 1.06 | 1.05 | 1.55 | 1.85 | 2.13 | 2.21 | 2.12 | 12.86 |
| Canada | 1.58 | 1.59 | 1.29 | 1.66 | 1.58 | 1.69 | 1.87 | 1.92 | 13.17 |
| Japan | 1.21 | 1.32 | 1.08 | 1.30 | 2.02 | 1.88 | 1.54 | 1.68 | 12.03 |
| Vietnam | 0.53 | 0.67 | 0.81 | 1.01 | 1.46 | 1.26 | 1.51 | 1.56 | 8.79 |
| Cambodia | - | - | - | - | 0.09 | 0.35 | 0.77 | 1.21 | 2.42 |
| Korea, Rep. | 1.39 | 1.44 | 1.26 | 1.10 | 1.45 | 1.09 | 0.93 | 0.95 | 9.62 |
| Indonesia | 0.73 | 0.70 | 0.69 | 0.93 | 1.30 | 1.08 | 0.94 | 0.83 | 7.20 |
| China | 2.50 | 1.27 | 1.04 | 1.36 | 1.49 | 0.93 | 0.86 | 0.61 | 10.06 |
| All origins | 15.27 | 15.48 | 14.06 | 17.19 | 21.78 | 19.53 | 19.96 | 20.43 | 143.70 |
The largest exporter, still growing
The largest exporter by a wide margin, and the target of duty actions on three continents. As US sales fell, shipments to Russia, the Gulf, Mexico, Brazil, and the EU rose. The EU has now raised duties as well.
America's largest supplier
Held the top position through the 2021 passenger-tyre order and the December 2024 truck and bus order. Thai plants, many of them foreign-owned, remain the main source of US supply, now at a higher cost after duties.
From zero to sixth in four years
No recorded tyre exports through 2021, then a 7.1x rise between 2022 and 2024, almost all of it going to the US. The fastest new trade route in the dataset.
Fewer tyres, more value each
German export receipts held near $6 billion across the period while unit counts fell by nearly a third. Germany competes on value per tyre, not on volume.
Cambodia, from zero
The second case is Cambodia, and it shows that duties can create a supplier country from nothing. Cambodia recorded no exports of new pneumatic tyres from 2018 through 2021. In 2022 it recorded $123 million. In 2023, $381 million. In 2024, $875 million, of which 88.4 percent went to the United States. The US side of the route, which files completely and includes 2025, shows imports from Cambodia at $1.21 billion last year. Cambodia is now the sixth-largest tyre supplier to the US market, four years after supplying nothing.
The timing follows the 2021 US duty orders on Korean, Taiwanese, Thai, and Vietnamese passenger tyres. New tyre plants, much of the investment Chinese, opened in Cambodia and began shipping to the US at duty rates lower than those the plants' home countries faced. The trade data shows the shift in origin; it cannot show how any single shipment was produced or routed. Regulators have examined that question directly. In September 2024, South Africa's International Trade Administration Commission opened an investigation into tyres routed from China through Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam to avoid existing duties, a practice it called country hopping. By mid-2025, a provisional anti-dumping duty of 41.47 percent applied to tyre imports from all three countries unless an exporter was specifically excluded.
The US changed Cambodia's costs through a different tool. Under the April 2025 reciprocal tariff action, Cambodian goods were first assigned a 49 percent rate, among the highest applied to any Southeast Asian country. Negotiations brought the rate down to 19 percent from August 1, 2025, later confirmed in a trade agreement between the two countries. The trade kept growing through all of it: the 2025 US-side figure of $1.21 billion is the route's largest year so far. The point for a financier is simple. The route is not fragile, but its duty rate moved by 30 percentage points in four months, and could move again. That risk comes from government decisions, not from tyre supply or demand.
The fastest new route in the dataset
The Russia swap
The third case is Russia. The cause was different: Western manufacturers left the Russian market after 2022, rather than a duty change. The result was the same kind of route change, at the same speed. Russia traded tyres in both directions before 2022: exports of $1.35 billion in 2021 on its own filings, imports of $2.12 billion the same year. Russia stopped filing after 2021, so both sides of its trade must now be read from its partners' filings.
On the export side, partner filings show the world buying $1.42 billion of Russian tyres in 2021, $736 million in 2022, $186 million in 2023, and $152 million in 2024. Fewer countries filed in the later years (105 in 2021, 61 in 2024), so the later figures understate the total. Even so, the direction is clear: Russian tyre exports fell to a small fraction of their 2021 level within three years.
On the import side, China's filings show the replacement. Chinese tyre shipments to Russia were $528 million in 2021, when China held 20.5 percent of Russia's import market on Russia's last complete filing. They reached $1.11 billion in 2022 and peaked at $1.69 billion in 2023, 3.19 times the 2021 level, before easing to $1.48 billion in 2024. Western tyre manufacturers sold or closed their Russian operations across 2022 and 2023, and Chinese supply filled the space within the same period. Russia now buys far more than it sells, and most of what it buys comes from China.
Russian exports fall, Chinese supply rises
Europe moves
The fourth case is Europe, where new duties took effect in July 2026. The starting position matches the United States in 2018: a large market with a large Chinese share. While Chinese sales to the US fell, Chinese sales to the EU rose: EU27 imports of new pneumatic tyres from China went from $2.30 billion in 2018 to $3.77 billion in 2024 on member-state filings, with 2025 running at $3.64 billion, close to the record. On the narrower definition used in the European Commission's investigation, passenger and light-lorry tyres only, Chinese imports were roughly 93 million units and over 2.5 billion euros in 2024, a 28 percent share of a market of about 330 million units.
On July 7, 2026, the Commission imposed final anti-dumping duties of 4.3 to 45.3 percent on those imports, finding that Chinese tyres sold at unfairly low prices were harming an EU industry that employs over 80,000 people across 14 member states. The useful comparison is the United States after 2018. When the US raised the cost of Chinese tyres, Chinese exports did not fall. They went to other markets, and new supplier countries appeared; Figure 1 shows where. The EU duties now put a similar volume in motion. A second EU requirement follows on December 30, 2026, when the EU Deforestation Regulation requires large and medium companies selling natural-rubber products in the EU to show that the rubber was not grown on recently deforested land, traced back to the plantation it came from.
The global numbers show why the pattern is likely to repeat. World exports grew from $80.7 billion in 2018 to $98.8 billion in 2023, up 22.5 percent, even as the largest import market raised duties again and again. Each time, the trade reorganized around the new rules instead of shrinking. There is no strong reason to expect the European round to be different. New routes will form over the next two years, and the American experience is a reasonable guide to where.
World exports through the duty years
Where the trade could move
The data already points to the likely answers, because the movement started before the duties did. Three routes stand out. First, suppliers that already sell to the EU will take the first share. EU imports of tyres from Vietnam were $98 million in 2018 and $386 million in 2024, about four times as much, with 2025 higher again at $489 million. Over the same period, EU imports grew 75 percent from India, 72 percent from Thailand, and 48 percent from Korea. These routes exist, the customers exist, and duties on China make every one of them more competitive overnight.
Second, production is moving inside Europe itself. Serbia sits next to the EU, outside the duty wall, and hosts the first Chinese tyre factory in Europe: Linglong's plant in Zrenjanin, built for $990 million with a planned capacity of 13.62 million tyres a year, in mass production since September 2024. The company has told investors it shifts orders between its Thailand and Serbia plants specifically to manage duty exposure, and it has moved production of truck tyres for the European market from China and Thailand to Serbia. EU imports from Serbia were $372 million in 2018, $679 million in 2024, and $734 million in 2025. This is the Cambodia pattern applied to Europe, with one difference: the factory was running before the duties arrived.
Third, the Chinese tyres that no longer clear EU duties will go where the American overflow went: the Gulf, Latin America, Russia, and other markets outside the duty wall. The United Kingdom is one to watch. It is not covered by the EU regulation, and its imports of Chinese tyres rose from $608 million in 2018 to $855 million in 2024. The follow-on risk is also visible in the record: South Africa has already imposed duties on tyres routed through third countries, and the same scrutiny tends to reach new origins once their volumes grow. Anyone financing the routes above should expect the rules to follow the flows.
Already growing into the EU
Germany: the premium segment
The last section is Germany, the exporter least affected by all of the above. Germany competes on value per tyre, not volume. It shipped 97.2 million tyres in 2018 and 67.8 million in 2025, a 30.2 percent fall in units. Its export receipts barely moved: $6.05 billion in 2018, $5.72 billion in 2025. The average value per tyre rose from $62.24 to $84.34, up 35.5 percent. German plants moved toward tyres for new vehicles and premium replacement tyres, and left the budget segment to Asian producers.
For a financier, the two segments behave differently. The premium segment has higher prices per tyre, long-standing customers, and mostly intra-European routes that change slowly. The volume segment has the growth, and it has the duty risk. One note on method: this comparison uses unit counts only where a country files them consistently, which Germany does. Several large exporters do not, so this article makes no global per-tyre claims.
Germany: fewer tyres, higher value per tyre
Three observations for trade finance
Origin decides the duty bill
The duty on a tyre shipment depends on where it was made and who made it. South Africa's provisional 41.47 percent duty covers three origin countries unless an exporter is specifically excluded, and US rates on comparable cargo range from a few percent to over 40 depending on origin and producer. Anyone financing Southeast Asian tyre shipments should check certificates of origin, producer identity, and duty status with the same care as the buyer's credit.
Routes change faster than loan terms
China-to-US fell 64 percent in six years. Cambodia-to-US went from zero to $1.21 billion in four. Russia's suppliers changed within two. Tyre routes now form and fade within a few years, while loans against unpaid invoices and loans that fund factories run for longer than that. Lenders whose collateral crosses these routes need limits on how much sits on any one route, regular route reviews, and pricing that can adjust if duty rates change.
The EU duties will redraw the map again
The July 2026 EU duties affect a flow of roughly 93 million units a year. The American experience since 2018 shows what happens next: shipments divert to other markets, new production countries appear, and every remaining supplier to the protected market adjusts its prices. Each new buyer and supplier pairing needs working capital before it needs anything else. The routes that will matter in 2028 are being set up and financed now.
Eight years of duties did not shrink the tyre trade. They changed its routes, and the routes are about to change again.
World exports of new pneumatic tyres grew 22.5 percent between 2018 and the 2023 peak while the United States placed duty orders on five supplier countries. China's exports rose 47 percent while its US share fell from 15.1 to 3.7 percent. Cambodia went from no tyre exports to a billion-dollar supplier in three years. Russia's suppliers changed within two.
For pricing, the practical point is that the main risk on tyre routes comes from regulation, not from the tyre market itself. Duty status, origin documents, and producer identity can change the total cost of a shipment by tens of percentage points within the life of a single loan. The July 2026 EU regulation makes the European routes the next place this will play out.
The specialist work is reading each route from both sides of the filings, at the pace the rules change. That is the work this desk does.
For questions on how these shifts affect existing or planned trade finance exposures, contact the Ossiano Research Desk.
References
Primary trade data (directly used)
- UN Comtrade Plus, bulk extracts, HS 4011, exports and imports, 2018-2025. Basis for every bilateral figure, table, and chart in this article, including the Russian mirror reconstruction. comtradeplus.un.org
Regulatory and policy instruments
- European Commission, DG Trade: regulation imposing definitive anti-dumping duties of 4.3 to 45.3 percent on passenger-car and light-lorry tyres from China, published July 7, 2026. Source for the duty range, the 93 million unit and over 2.5 billion euro import figures, the 28 percent market share, the 330 million unit consumption figure, and the 80,000 employment figure in Parts 1 and 5. policy.trade.ec.europa.eu
- Federal Register 2024-29606: Truck and Bus Tires From Thailand, antidumping duty order, applicable December 17, 2024. Source for the order date in Part 2. federalregister.gov
- US Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration: final determination in the antidumping investigation of truck and bus tires from Thailand, October 10, 2024. Source for the 48.39 percent and 12.33 percent rates in Part 2 and the Thailand spotlight. trade.gov
- US International Trade Commission: passenger vehicle and light truck tire proceedings, including the 2021 orders on Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, the countervailing duty order on Vietnam, and the sunset determinations maintaining the China orders. Source for the duty ledger in Part 2. usitc.gov
- Office of the US Trade Representative: fact sheet on the US-Cambodia agreement on reciprocal trade, October 2025, confirming the 19 percent reciprocal tariff rate. The initial 49 percent rate was assigned under Executive Order 14257, April 2025. Source for Part 3 and the Cambodia spotlight. ustr.gov
Sector reporting
- Tyrepress: South Africa launches investigation into tyres from Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, October 2024. Source for the ITAC anti-circumvention investigation and the country hopping description in Part 3. tyrepress.com
- Freight News: report on the SARS provisional anti-dumping duty of 41.47 percent on tyres from Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, June 2025. Source for the provisional duty figure in Part 3 and Observation 01. freightnews.co.za
- Tyrepress: report on Linglong relocating production of truck tyres for the European market from China and Thailand to its Serbia plant, March 2024. Source for the production shift in the Where the trade could move section. tyrepress.com
- European Rubber Journal: report on Linglong telling investors it would shift US-bound truck tyre orders from Thailand to Serbia in response to US duties, November 2023. Source for the duty management strategy in the same section. european-rubber-journal.com
- Linglong Tire company announcements: Serbia plant investment of $990 million, planned annual capacity of 13.62 million tyres, mass production from September 2024. Company-reported figures, stated as such. prnewswire.com
- Mongabay: reporting on EU Deforestation Regulation implementation timing, May 2026. Source for the December 30, 2026 compliance date in Part 5. news.mongabay.com
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