The new Tyre Intelligence Europe data platform is developing quickly, with 132 UK tyre sales locations incorporated by mid-February. Data is structured to distinguish clearly between consumer, van and 4×4 – delineating between retail and wholesale sources – an approach that also applies to truck and bus tyre sales.
Independent tyre industry specialist Kevin Glynn has been appointed consultant to the new Tyre Intelligence Europe data service. The platform is designed to deliver robust, speedy and insightful tyre sales data and reports for mainland UK and Northern Ireland “sharer” dealers and subscribers.
As we have seen, the high performance tyre market is a complex and competitive environment. The fact that most manufacturers define and therefore calculate the market in a slightly different way adds to the complexity. With this in mind, Tyres & Accessories asked GfK automotive account director Kevin Glynn for some outside insights into what is going on in the world of high performance tyres.
The UK is the second largest 4×4 tyre market in Europe, according to the latest data provided by well-known market researchers and tyre market analysts GfK. During recent discussions with GfK automotive account director Kevin Glynn, we learnt that the Italian 4×4 tyre segment is top of the pile and still growing, the UK’s share of this business is second-place but flat, and Germany takes the bronze medal in this respect, but is growing at nearly ten times the rate of the Italian 4×4 tyre market.
In Tyres & Accessories’ August 2013 Winter Tyre feature, we discussed the UK tyre industry’s continued deliberate steps towards the development of a winter tyre market, and the possibility offered by all-season tyres (which we’ll come to later). While the figures showed that sales of specialised products represent a much greater share of the market than you might have thought in the winter months, the correlative spikes in this figure remain confined to the months in which the weather is coldest. Market analyst GfK’s latest infographic on winter tyres, displayed on this page, goes further towards showing that this trend is prevalent even within the October-January period where winter tyre sales are most popular.
