Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin SCA ("General Company of the Michelin Enterprises P.L.S."), commonly referred to as Michelin ( MISH-əl-in, MITCH-əl-in, French: [miʃlɛ̃]), is a French multinational tyre manufacturer based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes région of France. In addition to the Michelin brand, it also owns the Kleber Tyre Company, Uniroyal (in North America, Colombia, and Peru), BFGoodrich, Riken, and SASCAR (among various others) brands. Michelin is also notable for its Red and Green travel guides, its roadmaps, the Michelin stars that the Red Guide awards to restaurants for their cooking, and for its company mascot Bibendum, colloquially known as the Michelin Man, who is a humanoid consisting of tyres. Michelin's numerous inventions include the removable tyre, the pneumatic tyre for automobiles, the pneumatic tyre for trucks, twin tyres on trucks, the asymmetric tyre, the run-flat tyre, the green tyre, the pneurail (a tyre for rubber-tyred metros) and the radial tyre for automobiles, trucks, earthmovers, aircraft, and motorcycles. Michelin manufactures tyres for Space Shuttles, aircraft, automobiles, heavy equipment, motorcycles, and bicycles. The company has been the world's largest tyre manufacturer by annual revenue since 2021. In 2012, the group produced 166 million tyres at sixty-nine facilities, located in eighteen countries.
History
In 1889, two brothers, Édouard Michelin (1859–1940) and André Michelin (1853–1931), took over Barbier Daubrée, a struggling farm implement business founded in 1832 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Barbier-Daubrée manufactured rubber parts for farm machinery such as valves and gaskets and other rubber items such as balls and brake pads. One day a cyclist whose pneumatic tyre needed repair turned up at the factory. The tyre was glued to the rim, and it took over three hours to remove and repair the tyre, which then needed to be left overnight to dry. The next day, Édouard Michelin took the repaired bicycle into the factory yard to test. After only a few hundred metres, the tyre failed. Despite the setback, Édouard was enthusiastic about the pneumatic tyre, and he and his brother worked on creating their own version, one that did not need to be glued to the rim. Barbier-Daubrée was reincorporated and renamed as Michelin on 28 May 1889. In 1891 Michelin took out its first patent for a removable pneumatic tyre which was used by Charles Terront to win the world's first long-distance cycle race, the 1891 Paris–Brest–Paris. Four years later, Michelin created the world's first pneumatic tyres (originally pioneered in 1888 by John Boyd Dunlop for bicycles) for automobiles, using them in a car called L'Eclair competing in the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race. In the 1920s and 1930s, Michelin operated large rubber plantations in Vietnam. Conditions at these plantations led to the famous labour movement Phú Riềng Đỏ.
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