Barum

Barum - tyres 2026 - market overview, tests, reviews

• Origin: Czech Republic
• Subsidiary of Continental
• Made in Czech Republic

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Barum is the world's most famous Czech tyre brand. The company from Otrokovice is guided by the philosophy of satisfactory quality for little money and probably thanks to that it is the best-selling tyre brand in our country. Since 1992, Barum has been part of the Continental AG group and is therefore referred to as Continental Barum.

About Continental Barum

Barum is gradually becoming one of the elite tyre manufacturers on the world market. Thanks to low prices and satisfactory quality, Barum tyres are already gaining popularity beyond the borders of the Czech Republic. Since 1991, the production of passenger car tyres has increased more than tenfold. Thanks to the growing demand for Barum tyres, the company now employs just under 4,000 people and has an annual turnover of more than 2 billion euro. Based on the Group's strategy, both quality and production capacity are growing, and Barum Continental has also become the largest passenger tyre manufacturing unit in Europe.

History

Barum owes its origins to the shoe factories of Tomáš Bat'a. At the beginning of the 1930s, tyres in Czechoslovakia were either overpriced imports or local high quality tyres. The high cost of transporting goods caused by the price of foreign tyres prompted Tomáš Bat'a to set up his own tyre factories. In 1932, the first Bata tyres were used on the journey from Zlín to Luhačovice. The demand for Bata tyres grew rapidly, so Tomáš Bata built new factories and expanded production both in terms of the number of units and the breadth of the product range, displacing competing tyres from Czechoslovakia. Barum as an independent company was not established until 1945, when the three largest Czechoslovak tyre manufacturers agreed to create a new brand to simplify exports, and the initial letters became the Barum brand - Bata, Rubena, Matador. In 1953, tyre production was transferred to the national company "Rudu říjen". The quantity of production was inadequate for the number of passenger cars, so in the early 1960s it was decided to build a new large-scale production plant in Otrokovice, which was opened with great glory in 1972. After the fall of the communist regime, the name of the company was changed to Barum a.s. Otrokovice. In 1992, a contract was signed with the German concern Continental, which meant access to new technologies for Barum. On 1 March 1993, Barum Continental spol. s.r.o. - the second largest joint venture in the Czech Republic - officially began to operate.

Activities

Since 2002, production has been operating at the High-Tech Cell plant, where the most demanding and technically advanced tyres of the entire concern are manufactured. At the same time, nowadays ContiSeal tyres are also produced in Otrokovice, which allow driving even with a punctured tread, so the company is now making a name for itself by producing demanding technologies in addition to increasing production.

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