Trade Docket 2026

The European case on the record

Bottom line. The European case that was open when the FY2025 report was signed is still open on the record this run can see. The European Union began an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese car and light-truck tyres on 21 May 2025 and a countervailing investigation into the same product on 6 November 2025; the Commission declined to impose provisional anti-dumping measures on 18 December 2025, and no definitive rate had been published at the end of 2025. Import registration has run since 22 January 2026. The revenue at risk is capped by a line the company has never broken out: RMB986.1 million, 8.4% of FY2025 sales.

The FY2025 annual report describes the European proceedings as unresolved. The European Union opened an anti-dumping investigation into car and light-truck tyres of Chinese origin on 21 May 2025 and a countervailing investigation into the same product on 6 November 2025; from 22 January 2026 it required importers to register the goods so that duty could later be applied retroactively; the dumping investigation period was calendar 2024 and the injury period ran back to 1 January 2021. The directors record "a certain impact on the Group's Shandong company" and frame the case as an opportunity to accelerate the overseas layout [1].

A peer carries the same docket one step further. Jiangsu General Science records that on 18 December 2025 the Commission gave notice that, in view of the technical complexity of the case, it would not impose provisional anti-dumping measures, that the investigation continued, and that as at the end of 2025 no final determination had been made and no final rate published [2]. That is where the record in this run ends: no filing, peer filing or news item indexed here reports a definitive European rate for this company or any other. What follows sizes the exposure without one.

The absence of a rate does not make the exposure unbounded, because the scope of the proceeding is already fixed. It covers tyres originating in China, so it reaches the Shandong base and not the Thai one, and it attaches to origin rather than to ownership — it does not sort the Chinese producers this report compares against each other the way the firm-specific United States rates do. The offshore-capacity ledger in Competition is where those differences live.

The registration is also less than it looks. Article 10(4) of the basic anti-dumping regulation conditions retroactive collection on provisional measures having been imposed, and on 18 December 2025 the Commission declined to impose them. The registration that has run since 22 January 2026 — the fact the FY2025 report flags as a risk — has no provisional measure behind it for a definitive duty to reach back to.

The size of the exposure

No filing in this corpus discloses revenue delivered to Europe. What it discloses is a six-way geographic split by delivery region, and Europe is inside the residual line.

Source: FY2025 Annual Report, Note 5 Segment Information, revenue by geographical location [3].

The company has used the same six-way split since it listed, and the 2018 prospectus defines the residual bucket: "Other countries" primarily comprises Oceanian and European countries [4]. Every euro of European revenue the group has ever booked sits in that line, alongside Australia and New Zealand. In FY2025 the line was RMB986.1 million [5], 8.4% of group revenue of RMB11,806.8 million.

That line has been the fastest-growing thing in the business. It was RMB280.0 million in FY2021 [6], RMB496.2 million in FY2022 [7], RMB714.2 million in FY2023 [8] and RMB915.6 million in FY2024 [9]. Over four years it compounded at 37.0% a year against 11.9% for the group, and its share of revenue rose from 3.7% to 8.4%.

Sources: revenue by geographical location in the FY2021 [10], FY2022 [11], FY2023 [12], FY2024 [13] and FY2025 [14] annual reports; shares computed against reported group revenue.

RMB986.1 million is a ceiling, and a generous one. Three filters cut it down before any duty is paid. The proceeding covers only tyres of Chinese origin, so anything made at the Thai base is out — and the overseas segment, whose only plant is in Thailand, booked RMB4,527.1 million of the FY2025 total against RMB7,279.7 million domestic [15]. It covers only tyres with a load index not exceeding 121, which is the semi-steel range plus light-truck sizes, and semi-steel radials were RMB4,936.1 million of group revenue against RMB6,664.2 million of all-steel [16]. And the bucket itself contains Oceania as well as Europe.

Applying those filters gives a range rather than a number, because the company publishes neither the European share of the bucket nor a base-by-destination cut.

Sources: derived from the FY2025 revenue by geographical location [17], segment revenue by operating location [18], revenue by product [19] and profit for the year of RMB1,087.6 million [20]; no duty rate is on this run's record, so the duty columns are stated per 10 percentage points of rate.

The last row is the mix-neutral benchmark: if European sales carried the group's own product mix (41.8% semi-steel) and the group's own base mix (61.7% Shandong), RMB254.2 million of the bucket would be in scope. The exposed figure is likely higher than that on the product filter — Chinese exports to Europe skew heavily to passenger tyres, and the group's own European truck-tyre range only launched in June 2026 — and lower than the ceiling on the origin filter. Roughly RMB250 million to RMB630 million of exposed revenue is what the disclosure supports; each 10 percentage points of definitive duty on that range is RMB25 million to RMB63 million of gross duty, 2.3% to 5.8% of FY2025 profit for the year.

Two qualifications keep that from being read as a profit hit. The duty is levied on the importer against the customs value at the Union frontier, so the group loses only the share it cannot pass into price — and whatever rate is set applies to Chinese-origin producers as a class rather than to this company alone, which makes some pass-through more likely than in a firm-specific case. And the volume response matters as much as the rate: the annual report already notes that Chinese semi-steel export growth "slowed significantly in the fourth quarter due to the impact of the EU's anti-dumping investigation," before any duty existed [21].

The older truck-tyre measure

The passenger case is the second European measure on this group, not the first, and no annual report in this corpus mentions the first one.

Chinese-origin tyres for buses and lorries with a load index exceeding 121 — the heavy end of the all-steel range, which is 56.4% of group revenue in total — have carried European anti-dumping and countervailing duties since 2018. A peer's own filing records that on 15 January 2025 the Commission completed expiry reviews of both and continued them for a further five years, effective 17 January 2025, as company-differentiated fixed amounts per tyre: anti-dumping duty of €0 to €35.74 a tyre and countervailing duty of €3.75 to €57.28 a tyre across the companies covered [22]. That filing assigns no amount to Prinx Chengshan, and nothing in this corpus states where in those ranges its Shandong entity sits.

Those are fixed amounts per tyre, not percentages, so what they cost depends on the price of the tyre. Prinx Chengshan sold 8.398 million sets of all-steel radials in FY2025 [23] for RMB6,664.2 million [24], an average realised price of RMB793.5 a set. At the top of the peer-filed ranges the two duties together come to €93.02 a tyre, which at euro rates of RMB8.0 to RMB8.5 over the period is RMB744 to RMB791, or 94% to 100% of that average price. At the bottom of the ranges they come to €3.75, under 5% of it. Where in that span the Shandong entity falls is the difference between a cost and an exclusion, and the corpus does not say.

That range frames what the group has been building in Europe. It opened a European sales centre years ago [25], incorporated Prinx Chengshan Tire Europe GmbH in Darmstadt in March 2020 [26], completed European warehousing during 2025 [27], deepened its European original-equipment programmes [28], opened a European technical centre in November 2025 and launched the Xelera truck-tyre range at The Tire Cologne in June 2026 [29] [30]. A European truck-tyre push launched in the eighth year of a European duty on Chinese-origin truck tyres is more easily supplied from outside Shandong, and Thailand is the only base operating today. The filings do not say where the Xelera range is made, which is the disclosure that would convert this from an inference into a fact.

The two European dockets bear on different halves of the product line. All-steel radials are 56.4% of revenue and have carried European anti-dumping and countervailing duties since 2018; semi-steel radials are 41.8% and are the subject of the open passenger case. Both point the European build-out at offshore supply, on the same logic that built Thailand, and the base that would carry it, Malaysia, is not scheduled for trial production until the fourth quarter of 2026 [31], with capacity released across 2027 and 2028. The return arithmetic on that base is in Return on Capital; what this chapter adds is that its European demand case depends on the outcome of a proceeding the group does not control.

The subsidy case, still open

The subsidy half of the passenger case opened on 6 November 2025 [32] and, like the dumping half, has produced no determination on this record. Any countervailing duty would stack on top of whatever anti-dumping duty is set, and the truck-tyre precedent is not reassuring about the relative size: on that product the peer-filed countervailing range of €3.75 to €57.28 a tyre runs above the anti-dumping range of €0 to €35.74 [33].

What a subsidy investigation would look at is already disclosed. The group records a US$30 million facility from Bank of China (Thai) and a US$48 million facility from HSBC's Bangkok branch, both entered into on 15 March 2024 [34], and its register includes Sinotruk at 8.59% with a board seat, as recorded in People. Those are ordinary financing and register disclosures in a Hong Kong filing. Whether a European countervailing calculation reaches them, through which programmes and at what rate, is not answerable from this corpus, and no chapter of this report prices it.

The rest of the docket, dated

The European proceedings are the largest open items, but they land inside a calendar of measures and events that is unusually dense over the next six months. The dated items below are what the next twelve months of earnings run through.

Sources: FY2025 Annual Report on the European and South African cases [35], the Malaysia construction timetable [36], the giant off-road tire milestone [37] and the carbon border mechanism [38]; a peer filing on the January 2025 expiry reviews and the December 2025 provisional-measures decision [39] and the deforestation timetable [40]; the news record for the H1 2025 interim, chief-executive and US review dates [41] [42]; the US Supreme Court ruling is outside this corpus.

Three of those entries deserve a sentence each.

The FY2026 interim, due by 31 August 2026, is the first filing that will show whether the Thai margin recovered; the half-year split it runs against is set out in Business. No interim report for any year is indexed in this run, so that number will have to be read from the announcement itself.

The measures outside Europe and the United States are proliferating rather than resolving. A peer's FY2025 filing records a Eurasian Economic Union sunset review opened on 14 November 2025 on Chinese truck tyres, where existing rates of 14.79% to 35.35% may be continued, and a Colombian anti-dumping investigation opened on 21 October 2025 on the same product [43]. Neither names Prinx Chengshan, and neither is in its filings; both apply to Chinese-origin truck tyres, which is the group's largest product line from its largest base.

The green rules arrive on the same schedule as the trade rules. The group's own risk section flags the proposed extension of the European carbon border mechanism to tyres in 2026, requiring full life-cycle carbon disclosure, alongside China's new tyre energy-consumption standards effective May 2025 [44]; a peer dates the deforestation regulation's application to the end of 2026 [45]. These are compliance costs rather than duties, and no filing quantifies them.

Sources: revenue by geographical location in the FY2025 Annual Report [46]; the exposed figure applies the group's own FY2025 product and base mix to the Other countries line, and no definitive European rate is on this run's record.

What would change the read

The evidence supports a narrow conclusion: the European passenger case is a cost in prospect on a small and fast-growing part of the business, the retroactive collection the FY2025 report flags has no provisional measure behind it, and the more consequential European fact is the older truck-tyre measure that the company's filings never mention. On the disclosure available, roughly RMB250 million to RMB630 million of revenue is exposed, so each 10 percentage points of duty costs RMB25 million to RMB63 million against a profit for the year of RMB1,087.6 million [47]. For comparison, restoring the Thai base to its FY2024 margin would be worth RMB302.9 million of gross profit, as set out in Thailand Margin and Tax.

The strongest fact against that read is that neither European half has reported on this record. The corpus bounds the exposed revenue but not the rate: the anti-dumping determination is not on it, a countervailing duty would stack on top of whatever that determination sets, and on the truck-tyre product the peer-filed countervailing range runs above the anti-dumping range. Nothing in the corpus caps either, and this chapter's sensitivity is stated per 10 points of rate for that reason.

Three disclosures would settle most of this, and the group makes none of them. A Europe line separated from Oceania in the geographic note would replace the whole sensitivity table above with a number. A base-by-destination cut would say how much of that Europe line is made in Shandong rather than Thailand. And naming the production base for the European truck-tyre range would show whether the Thai plant is already doing the work the Malaysian plant is being built to do. Until then the range stands, and the dated items that narrow it are the FY2026 interim, due by 31 August 2026, and the two European determinations themselves.