Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd. is pleased to announce that our innovative SENSING CORE Tire Sensing Technology received the prestigious "Tire Technology of the Year Award" at this year's "Tire Technology International Awards for Innovation and Excellence." The awards ceremony was held as part of "Tire Technology Expo 2019," which took place this past March 5th through 7th in Hanover, Germany.

This is the third time that Sumitomo Rubber Industries has received this award for our outstanding technologies, having won for our "4th Generation Run-Flat Tire Technology" in 2010 and for our "ADVANCED 4D NANO DESIGN New Materials Development Technology" in 2017. At the awards ceremony held on March 6th, Mr. Hiroaki Kawasaki, the Manager of our DWS Business Team (part of our company's Automotive System Division), gave a speech in which he declared, "Tires are one of the core components that determine the basic functions of a vehicle: vehicles cannot drive without tires. In the future mobility society in which autonomous driving and car sharing will become popular, the importance of such tires will grow ever greater.

SENSING CORE is a new tire technology which changes the tire itself into a sensor. It is able to detect the tire traction level, tire pressure loss through our software algorithms without any additional hardware like sensors. I believe that SENSING CORE is one of the key technologies that will contribute to the realization of autonomous driving and a safer mobile society."

Held in Europe each year since its inception in 2001, the "Tire Technology Expo" is a trade exhibition and technical conference concerning tire manufacturing and the overall tire industry. Each year, the expo features various research reports and presentations from tire manufacturers as well as raw material suppliers and public research institutions, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes outstanding technical achievement in five separate categories*.

"SENSING CORE" is a technology that analyzes wheel speed signals (generated by tire rotation) to detect information on road conditions (such as slipperiness), tire load and so forth. Through further development, future iterations of this technology will be able to aggregate this tire data with various cloud-based information collected at the municipal and even societal level, which will then allow vehicles to utilize comprehensive data to better sense and preempt potential hazards arising out of both road and tire conditions. Sumitomo Rubber Industries recently launched our "SMART TYRE CONCEPT" as a Tire Technology Development Concept that aims to achieve "Ever Greater Safety Performance" and "Ever Greater Environmental Performance." "SENSING CORE" is one of the core technologies that make up the heart of "SMART TYRE CONCEPT."

We at Sumitomo Rubber Industries are pleased to accept this award as a further sign of the widespread recognition that we have received for both our innovative efforts to respond to sweeping changes in the automotive industry in ways that transcend tire manufacturing as well as the advanced technologies that these efforts have brought about. We will continue working to develop new technologies that further contribute to the development of a safer, more environmentally friendly mobility society for the future.

* 5 Award Categories: Environmental Achievement of the Year, Tire Technology of the Year, Tire Industry Supplier of the Year, Tire Manufacturing Innovation of the Year, Tire Manufacturer of the Year.

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SENSING CORE Tire Sensing Technology Receives Tire Technology of the Year Award

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