The Indonesian Rubber Council (DEKARINDO) projects that this year’s rubber absorption will only be around 550,000 tons, down about 22 percent compared to last year’s absorption of 711,360 tons.
In line with this projection, the Central Statistics Agency noted that until the third quarter of 2020, the rubber and plastic rubber goods industry’s performance still contracted 9.61%.
Chairman of the Indonesian Rubber Council (Dekarindo) Azis Pane said that currently, the demand for the shoe industry has decreased, but the glove industry is increasing. Unfortunately, the production of gloves still uses latex, which has to be imported.
Azis said that last year the three primary industries that absorbed natural rubber in past year were the tire industry (260,160 tons), footwear (103,400 tons), and tire retreading (97,700 tons).
Currently, the tire industry is improving after being hit by a domestic demand vacuum for six months. However, Azis projects that the uptake of natural rubber by the tire industry in 2020 will only reach 156,096 tons.
However, there is an increasing trend in the use of retread tires that will make the retread tire industry’s production volume increase by 20% by the end of the year. The absorption of natural rubber by the retread tire industry reached 97,700 tons in 2019 or grew 4.88% from the previous year’s realization.
Meanwhile, this consumption is greater than the combined consumption of the rubber gloves and two-wheel tires industry in the same year. Meanwhile, the number of retread tire production in 2019 edged up 0.99% to 20.9 million units.
The retread tire industry’s utilization is consistently at the level of 80%, although the production amount continues to grow because the industry’s installed capacity continues to grow by around 2.94% per year during 2014-2019. ***