Hankook is ranked seventh among the world’s tyre companies. It produces around 50 million tyres each year. It employs 14,000 people. The brand’s tyres are original equipment for cars such as Opel, Kia, Audi, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford and Hyundai. The company currently has two factories in South Korea, one each in Hungary, Indonesia and the USA, and three in China. Hankook also has a partnership with the German company Hamann Motorsport. Hankook tyres are used for the Asian and American Le Mans Series races. The Korean company’s products are known for their high level of safety and durability. They can be purchased in 180 countries around the world.

The company’s history begins in 1941. The company built its position from scratch and slowly gained a foothold in the market. Gradually, it gained both qualified staff and modern technology, and implemented successful business strategies.

The company’s development was helped by the boom in the automotive industry that occurred in the 1950s.

Hankook has always attached great importance to conducting research programmes. In 1982, the Central Research Institute was established in Daejeon. Then the Arkon Technical Center was established in the city of Arkon, Ohio, the centre of the world tyre industry. This was the first Hankook-owned facility to be located on the other side of the Ocean. In the 1990s, Hankook turned its expansion towards China and established a subsidiary in Beijing. The South Korean company also reached out to Europe, establishing a new research centre in Hannover, Germany. Thanks to these activities, the company’s export turnover exceeded the half-billion-dollar mark in 1995.

At the turn of the millennium, the company opened a European Distribution Centre in Rotterdam. A very important moment in the company’s development was the agreement with Michelin, thanks to which Hankook opened a number of new subsidiaries in Europe – in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Turkey. In 2007, production of the brand’s tyres began at a factory in Hungary. The plant, which was built in Dunaujvaros, is an impressive 560,000-square-metre facility and cost more than €500 million to build. The factory was already capable of producing 15,000 tyres a day when it started up.

Thanks to this investment, Hankook has gained its current position in the market.