Kanwar Tulip celebrates Apollo Tyres’ Dutch connection

Along with cheese, clogs and windmills, many people closely associate tulips with the Netherlands. Apollo Tyres has thus commissioned an all-new variant of Tulipa to mark the 15th anniversary of its acquisition of Vredestein as well as the recent 115th anniversary of the Dutch brand’s founding. This new variant is named after the Kanwar family, which founded and owns Apollo Tyres.

Introducing the Kanwar Tulip, Apollo Tyres shares that its flower has highly distinctive purple petals, a colour echoing the primary hue of the Apollo Tyres logo. Company chairman Onkar Kanwar and vice chairman and managing director Neeraj Kanwar were presented with a bouquet of Kanwar Tulips during a visit to Amsterdam this week.

The unique cultivar of the Kanwar Tulip was specially bred by Jan Ligthart, with the first batch grown at Den Helder, north of Amsterdam.

Kanwar Tulip (Photo: Apollo Tyres)

Tyre making since 1908

Vredestein was founded in 1908 to design and manufacture bicycle tyres in Loosduinen in the Netherlands. Building momentum over the first few years of operation, the company diversified into the production of car tyres in 1912.

In 1952, the company opened its Enschede factory in the Twente region in eastern Netherlands, which has continued to produce an award-winning range of summer, winter and all-season passenger car tyres. The facility enabled Vredestein to become pioneers in the all-season tyre segment, most notably through the launch of the first Quatrac tyre in 1991, which remains a popular model line across Europe.

Apollo Tyres states that the Vredestein brand presented it with the “perfect entry into Europe’s highly competitive premium tyre market.” Since the acquisition in 2009, Apollo Tyres has continued to invest in its European R&D and European production capabilities in order to create “premium-quality tyres that offer superior levels of performance, durability and safety at an attractive price point.”

Vredestein instrumental to Apollo’s European growth

“Since 2009, we have seen the Vredestein brand go from strength to strength, and we are honoured to be a part of its continued success story,” says Benoit Rivallant, president of Apollo Tyres Europe. “Although very much still rooted in its Dutch heritage, the brand is now recognised globally for its impressive variety of industry-leading tyres for cars, trucks, agricultural machinery and bicycles; it has been instrumental to the development of Apollo Tyres in Europe.”

Since acquiring Vredestein, Apollo Tyres has overseen a number of significant product developments and projects. In 2014, it launched the Vredestein Wintrac Xtreme S, expanding the Vredestein brand’s winter tyre portfolio. In the same year, the company invested in the Enschede manufacturing plant to increase production capacity and meet growing demand in Europe. In 2015, Apollo Tyres expanded its agricultural product line with the launch of the Traxion Harvest, and with new variants of the Traxion Versa and Endurion.

2017 marked the opening of Apollo tyres’ new production facility in Hungary which, alongside the Enschede plant in the Netherlands, is responsible for Europe’s first dedicated all-season EV tyre, the Quatrac Pro EV, and the recently launched Ultrac Pro ultra-ultra-high-performance summer tyre.