The Real Owners Behind All The Major Tire Brands

Picking the right tires for your car or truck can be a tricky task, not least because there are so many different tire models on the market to choose from, hailing from a diverse range of brands. However, not all of these brands are quite as they seem. Like any other area of the automotive industry, tiremaking companies go through changes of ownership on a regular basis, with some becoming subsidiaries of other, larger companies while others remain independent.

Keeping up with exactly which companies own which brands isn’t easy. However, if you’ve ever stared at the racks of tires in a shop and wondered exactly who you’re giving your money to when you buy them, then wonder no more. We’ve gone digging through the paperwork to uncover exactly who owns each tire brand, as well as recapping the history of each brand to illustrate how it ended up under its current ownership.

While technically Lego is the world’s largest tire maker by volume, Michelin is the world’s largest producer of regular-sized vehicle tires. The company was originally founded in France in 1889, and in 1891 it made history by producing the first detachable bicycle tire. Four years later, Michelin designed the first air-filled car tire, and by 1898, the famous Michelin Man logo had been created. Ever since, Michelin has remained at the forefront of tire technology, with its tire models receiving consistent praise from owners and reviewers alike.

We ranked Michelin the best major tire brand on the market, partly thanks to that consistent praise and partly because of its wide range of tire models. Michelin is a publicly traded company today, with a primary listing on the Paris Stock Exchange. It’s mostly owned by a mix of institutional investors, retail investors, and mutual funds. Mage Invest, the holding company owned by members of the founding Michelin family, also owns a 4.29% stake in the business.

Pirelli is one of the oldest tire companies still in existence. Founded in 1872, it originally manufactured a variety of rubber items, including parts for horse-drawn carriages, and expanded into car tire production in 1901. Pirelli quickly grew its manufacturing capacity, expanding beyond its home country of Italy to open plants in Spain, the U.K., and Argentina. By 1929, Pirelli also had a manufacturing plant in Brazil.

Over the following decades, Pirelli kept up its breathless pace of expansion, developing new tire lines, entering new markets, and buying up a variety of businesses, some tire-related and some completely unrelated. It even tried to acquire rival tire giant Continental at the start of the ’90s, but was ultimately unsuccessful. After a long period of rapid acquisitions, Pirelli eventually reversed course and trimmed down its business operations. It sold off its unrelated business operations — including, strangely enough, a broadband ISP division — in 2010, and went back to being solely a tire maker.

Today, Pirelli is a publicly traded company with around 35.6% of its shares owned by institutional and retail investors. According to the latest company documents, Italian investment firm Camfin also owns a 27.4% stake in the company, while the Chinese state-owned Sinochem Group holds the largest individual stake in Pirelli, at 37%.

The Yokohama tire brand can trace its history back to 1917, when it was founded as a joint venture between the Japanese Yokohama Electric Cable Manufacturing Company and the American BFGoodrich Company. Its first plant was completed in 1920 and it immediately began producing tires alongside a variety of other rubber products. Yokohama had plenty of big setbacks in its early days: in 1923, just three years after it opened, the brand’s factory was destroyed by an earthquake. The company built a new plant that opened in 1929, only for it to be destroyed again during a wartime raid in 1945.

After every seemingly existential threat, the company bounced back — no pun intended — stronger than before, and today it manufactures tires in a variety of locations across the globe. In 2024, the brand achieved record sales revenue, bringing in more than 1 trillion yen (around $6.7 billion)  in earnings for the first time. Yokohama Rubber Co Ltd remains a publicly traded, independent company, with most of its shares owned by various Japanese and American asset management companies and mutual funds.

An independent company with a very long list of subsidiaries, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co has been around since 1898. Like many modern tiremaking companies, Goodyear initially made a variety of rubber products before later specializing in vehicle tires as the automobile surged in popularity throughout the 20th century. It’s another firm that’s owned primarily by various asset management groups and funds.

The Goodyear brand takes its name from inventor Charles Goodyear, who invented vulcanized rubber in 1839. However, Goodyear himself was not related to the company in any way — in fact, he died in 1860, leaving behind a mountain of debt thanks to a failed business venture. Instead, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co was founded by two brothers, Frank and Charley Seiberling, with Frank credited with creating the brand’s famous wingfoot logo. That logo can famously be seen on Goodyear’s fleet of blimps, which were first introduced as marketing tools in 1925, having been originally designed for military use in the First World War.

Many of America’s biggest tire brands were founded in Akron, Ohio. Goodyear’s first factory was located in Akron, but by the time it was in business, BFGoodrich had already been operating in the city for almost 30 years. BFGoodrich first opened its doors in 1870, making it one of the oldest tire brands around today. It produced the first pneumatic car tires in America in 1896, eventually expanding its product range from rubber-based products into plastic products and various other chemicals. The company can also take credit for manufacturing the first space suits for American astronauts.

This expansion continued until the 1980s, when BFGoodrich began to rearrange its company structure. By that point, its tire division had become merely part of its sprawling manufacturing business, and so it merged the division with Uniroyal, another long-running American tire maker, creating the Uniroyal-Goodrich Tire Company in 1986.

This company would prove to be short-lived, with Michelin buying both the BFGoodrich and Uniroyal brands in 1989. Today, the pair are among a laundry list of brands owned by the French company. The remaining parts of the original BFGoodrich manufacturing company continued to be split up over the following decades, and the last remnants of the company was acquired in 2011 by the defense conglomerate that’s now known as Raytheon Technologies.

Korean tire brand Hankook is owned by a variety of investors, with the largest single stake owned by the holding company Hankook and Company. This holding company is in turn owned by the family of the original founders of Hankook. The brand was originally launched in 1941 in Seoul, South Korea. It’s now one of the world’s largest tire makers, sold in over 160 countries around the world. However, 2025 hasn’t been a great year for Hankook.

The company’s biggest headache has been the sentencing and subsequent imprisonment of Cho Hyun-Beom, who serves as the chairman of Hankook and Company and also as the de facto leader of Hankook Tire. Cho reportedly owns around 42% of the Hankook holding company, as well as a direct minority stake in Hankook Tire & Technology. He was imprisoned after being found guilty of embezzlement from Hankook and sentenced to three years behind bars.

Having your chairman stuck in prison is hardly ideal for any company, but it comes at a particularly difficult time for Hankook. The company is trying to adapt to rapidly changing trade rules and tariffs imposed by the U.S., one of its key markets, and it had only completed an acquisition of Hanon Systems, an automotive systems manufacturer, in January 2025. Cho’s absence leaves the tire maker’s other minority owners, which include multiple international pension funds as well as various asset management companies, navigating the crisis alone.

A decades-long acquisition spree made Continental one of the biggest suppliers in the automotive industry, but it’s still a tire company at its core. It was originally founded as a rubber products manufacturer in 1871 and built its first automobile tire in 1898. The German manufacturer has a long history of producing both road and racing tires, with its partnerships with Porsche and Mercedes-Benz stretching back to the early days of each carmaker.

Continental AG is a publicly traded company, but a single holding company, INA-Holding Schaeffler GmbH & Co. KG, holds almost half of the company’s shares. This holding company is controlled by the Schaeffler Group, which is run by the family from which it takes its name. Schaeffler owns stakes in various other automotive parts manufacturers, and bought its 46% stake in Continental in 2009. Continental’s other investors include Norges Bank, which is the central bank of Norway and manages the country’s national pension fund, and the Norwegian Ministry of Finance. Both the bank and the ministry hold stakes of around 3%.

In 1931, Shojiro Ishibashi founded Bridgestone Tire in the Japanese city of Kurume. It has grown over the decades to incorporate manufacturing facilities across the globe, from Belgium to Brazil. Much like its biggest rivals, Bridgestone is an independent publicly traded company. However, it’s unusual in that the largest single stake of the company owned by the Ishibashi Foundation. The foundation was originally created by Bridgestone’s founder and owns an expansive art collection that includes a mix of Japanese and Western pieces. The collection contains pieces from globally renowned artists like Monet, Renoir, and Picasso, among many others.

This art is on display to the public at the Artizon Museum in Chuo City, Tokyo. Bridgestone almost certainly the only tiremaker to be partially owned by an art museum, but most of its other owners are far more conventional. The list of minority owners includes the usual array of asset management companies, alongside Nagasaka Corporation, a company that’s dedicated to managing the properties of various parts of the Bridgestone empire.

Compared to many of the other major tire brands, Falken doesn’t have a particularly long history, having only been launched in 1983. It was initially designed to be the high performance tire division of Ohtsu Rubber & Tire, and quickly established itself as a top tire brand within Japanese motorsport circles. Falken was always intended to be a global brand from its inception, and launched its sales division in the U.S. just two years after it was founded. It remained under its original ownership until Ohtsu was acquired by Sumitomo Rubber Industries in 2003.

Falken and Ohtsu remain under Sumitomo’s umbrella today. Ohtsu-branded tires are still stocked by some American tire retailers, but Falken remains the better-known brand of the two, in part thanks to its high-profile sponsorships of motorsports events such as Formula Drift. Its parent company Sumitomo also sells several tire models in the U.S. under its own name. Sumitomo Rubber Industries is publicly traded, with its stocks listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It’s part of a larger, intertwined group of Sumitomo companies, with Sumitomo Electric Industries being the single largest shareholder of Sumitomo Rubber Industries.

Similar to Bridgestone and Yokohama, Toyo Tire & Rubber is a publicly traded Japanese tire maker. It was founded in 1945 from a merger between two smaller Japanese rubber companies and established its first U.S. sales division in 1966. Also like Bridgestone and Yokohama, Toyo manufactures tires in the U.S., and has had a facility in Georgia since 2004.

Toyo and Bridgestone might be rivals, but Bridgestone owns a minority stake in Toyo, equal to around 1.62% of the company. Toyota Motor Corporation also owns a similarly small stake, while around 1% of Toyo is owned by its employees through the company’s Employee Shareholding Association. The largest single shareholder of Toyo by a significant margin is Mitsubishi Corporation, which owns roughly 20% of the company.

As well as selling tires under its own brand, the company also owns Nitto Tires as a subsidiary brand. Nitto and Toyo have been in a partnership since 1979, with Toyo eventually acquiring its former business partner.

For most of its history, Hoosier was an all-American tire brand. It was formed in 1957 when married entrepreneurs Bob and Joyce Newton started making racing tires and selling them around the Midwest, near the racetracks where Bob used to compete. Originally, it retreaded street tires to make them more suitable for racing, but in 1962 it partnered with Mohawk Rubber to begin manufacturing them from scratch. The brand has had a long association with Nascar, with the Hoosier Tire Team led by the company’s founders taking multiple wins in the ’80s and ’90s.

Hoosier continued to be led by its two founders until Bob’s passing in 2012. At that time, Hoosier had only recently inked a deal to collaborate with Continental to produce racing tires for the Rolex Sports Car Series. The partnership continued in the wake of Bob’s death, and eventually, in 2016, Continental acquired Hoosier Tires in its entirety. It’s one of a number of subsidiary brands that Continental owns, many of which will be familiar to American buyers.

One of Continental’s most notable subsidiary brands alongside Hoosier, General Tires has been under the German tire maker’s ownership since 1987. Today, its tires are made in a variety of locations across the U.S. and Europe. Like many American tire brands, General Tires was originally founded in Akron, Ohio, and initially made tires for trucks. Founded in 1915, General Tire gradually expanded its operations over the years to include everything from aerospace engineering to hotel development.

Eventually, making tires had become a relatively small part of the company’s overall business, and in 1987, a reshuffle saw several arms of the business, which was now known as GenCorp, sold off. This included the tire division, which was sold to Continental. General Tire later rebranded to Continental Tire North America, but continues to sell tires under the General Tire brand. As well as continuing to offer truck tires, the brand now also sells a range of tire models for passenger cars.

Another tire brand hailing from Akron, Ohio, Firestone was first formed in 1900. It manufactured its first tire in 1903 and saw explosive growth in its early years, which it used to enter the world of motorsports. Firestone became a sponsor of the Indy 500 in 1911 and has remained associated with the race for many decades since. As well as developing road and racing tires for cars, the brand also created America’s first rubber tractor tire in 1932.

By the mid-’50s, Firestone had become the world’s largest producer of rubber, as well as one of America’s biggest tire makers. However, the rapid rise of Japanese companies over the following decades eventually saw Firestone being bought up by a former rival, Bridgestone. In 1988, Bridgestone agreed to acquire Firestone, merging the two companies to create a new entity that was initially known as Bridgestone/Firestone Incorporated. However, a restructure in 2009 saw Firestone’s name dropped from its parent company, rendering it a subsidiary brand of Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, which is in turn a division of the global Bridgestone company.

John Boyd Dunlop, invented the first pneumatic tire in 1888 in a bid to make his son’s tricycle run smoother over rough ground. He patented the invention and set up a manufacturing business to make vehicle tires shortly after, founding the Dunlop company in his home city of Belfast, Ireland, and quickly expanding overseas.

One of these overseas ventures was in Japan, with Dunlop U.K. building a new factory in the country and setting up a separate company there. In 1917, the company was officially listed as a Japanese corporation. By 1963, the company was majority owned by Japanese investors, and was renamed to its current name, Sumitomo Rubber Industries.

In the mid-’80s, Sumitomo Rubber Industries had grown so large that it was able to acquire the original Dunlop Tire Corporation’s manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as its Technical Division. However, Goodyear ended up with the branding rights to Dunlop, separating the rights from the main company.

In early 2025, Goodyear announced that it was selling the American, European, and Australasian branding rights for the Dunlop brand to Sumitomo, reuniting the divided parts of the original company. However, it kept the rights to the Dunlop name for motorcycle tires, and noted that it would be licensing the name back from Sumitomo for its line of commercial truck tires.

Cooper Tires was created as an amalgamation of different tire companies, with the earliest of those being the M & M Company, which was purchased by two brothers-in-law in 1914. Like so many other American tire makers, it was based in Akron, Ohio. This revived company then bought Giant Tire & Rubber Company a few years later.

Shortly after, The Cooper Corporation was formed by Ira J. Cooper in 1919, which is where the modern brand gets its name. The two companies continued to operate independently until 1930, when they both merged with a third company, The Falls Rubber Company, to form a new entity, The Master Tire & Rubber Company.

Thankfully, from here, things get a bit less convoluted. Master Tire continued to operate through the Second World War and made various military supplies, before being rebranded to Cooper Tire & Rubber Company in 1946 when peace returned. Cooper Tires was acquired by Goodyear in 2021. It was formerly a publicly traded company, but after the Goodyear acquisition, it returned to private ownership, and today operates as a subsidiary of Goodyear Corporation.