Cooper Tire & Rubber history

Poor tire quality also prompted consumers to seek rebuilt tires, and in 1915 Schaefer and Hart purchased a tire rebuilding business, The Giant Tire & Rubber Company, also in Akron.

In 1917 the Giant Tire & Rubber operations, including its staff of 29, were moved to Findlay, Ohio, into buildings abandoned by the failed Toledo Findlay Tire Company.

Fire destroyed the main building of the Giant plant in 1919, but reconstruction of a new, single story plant began immediately.

The origins of the Cooper name go back to 1920, when Ira J. Cooper, a director for the company Schaefer and Hart, formed the Cooper Corporation.

The Cooper Corporation, the M and M Company, and The Falls Rubber company merged in 1930 to form the Master Tire and Rubber Company.

The Cooper oval trademark with the Cooper Knight headgear was first registered and used in 1941.

The company's contribution to the war effort was acknowledged in 1945 by the armed forces in a special ceremony bestowing the Army-Navy "E" Award.

In 1956 Cooper purchased a plant from the Dismuke Tire and Rubber Company in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

In 1964 an industrial rubber products division was established as a separate corporation known as Cooper Industrial Products, Inc.

Cooper completed research and development of its own radial tire manufacturing equipment and in-house product testing in 1973 and began full-scale production of steel-belted radial passenger tires at the Findlay and Texarkana plants the following year.

In 1981 the Texarkana plant reached a production record of more than five million tires.

The company joined the ranks of Fortune 500 companies in 1983 as one of the largest industrial companies in the United States.

A technical center for design, research and development, and testing was completed in 1984 at the Auburn, Indiana engineered products plant.

And in 1985, Cooper Tire & Rubber Company was enumerated among The 101 Best Performing Companies in America.

Cooper based its plans on several consistent factors that President and Chief Operating Officer Ivan Gorr described in a 1987 study.

A third addition enhanced the Findlay facility in 1988.

Net sales reached $1 billion in 1991.

Sales continued to grow under Rooney's leadership, totaling $1.6 billion by 1996.

The Ohio firm boosted its foreign operations with the March 1997 acquisition of Great Britain's Avon Rubber plc for $110.4 million.

The company's largest growth acquisition occurred in 1999 when it bought The Standard Products Company, which increased Cooper's total workforce by 10,000 employees.

In December 2003, Cooper agreed to a joint venture with Kenda Rubber Industrial Company, to construct a tire-manufacturing plant near Shanghai.

Then, returning the company to its core business of tire manufacturing, in December 2004, Cooper completed the sale of its automotive business, Cooper-Standard Automotive, for approximately $1.165 billion.

In 2005, Cooper continued expansion in China by obtaining majority ownership of China’s third largest tire manufacturer—Chengshan Group—and formed the Cooper Chengshang (Shandong) Tire Company (CCT), with a facility in Rongcheng, China.

In October 2007, Cooper entered into a 50-50 joint venture with Mexican tire manufacturer Corporación de Occidente SA de CV, forming a new company, Cooper Tire & Rubber Company de Mexico SA de VC (Cooper Mexico), to market, sell and distribute the Cooper and Pneustone brands.

In December 2011, Cooper bought a unit of the Serbian tire manufacturing company Trayal Corporation from Kruševac, from the Bulgarian company Brikel EAD for a sum of $13 million and invested as much as $50 million.

To complement the company’s well-established European operations and product offerings, in January 2012, Cooper acquired the assets of an existing tire plant in Krusevac, Serbia, providing an excellent location to supply tires to the European and Russian markets.

A Indian company named Apollo Tyres agreed to buy Cooper Tires for $2.5 billion on June 12, 2013.

In 2016, Cooper completed the purchase of a majority interest in China-based Qingdao Ge Rui Da Rubber Co. (GRT) for the production of truck and bus radial (TBR) tires.

Cooper announced it had won its first OE fitment with Volkswagen in 2017, supplying the high performance Cooper Zeon CS8 tire for Volkswagens’ T-Roc compact SUV sold in Europe.