Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. shares on Thursday rose the most in seven months after the Economic Times of India said Apollo Tyres Ltd. is in the process of buying a controlling stake in the U.S. tire maker based in Findlay.
Cooper, with roots in Akron, has its headquarters as well as a plant in Findlay, south of Toledo.
Apollo, India’s largest tire maker, could pay as much as $800 million for a stake in Cooper, the newspaper reported, citing people with direct knowledge of the effort.
Cooper had a stock market value of $1.17 billion as of Wednesday. Apollo, based in Gurgaon, India, could borrow $600 million to help finance the acquisition and has hired Standard Chartered Bank to help, the Economic Times said.
Cooper spokeswoman Anne Roman declined to comment.
The company has three other U.S. plants besides Findlay. Two are in Mississippi — Clarksdale and Tupelo — and one in Texarkana, Ark. Cooper closed a plant in Albany, Ga., in 2009. The tire maker also has plants in England, Serbia, Mexico and China.
On Thursday, Cooper shares rose 5.8 percent, or $1.09, to close at $19.78. Shares are up 41 percent for the year and 52 percent from a year ago.
Cooper says on its investor website that it is the fourth-largest tire manufacturer in North America and the 10th largest in the world, shipping tires to more than 155 countries and employing nearly 13,000 people worldwide. The company said it has a 13 percent market share in the United States.
Cooper’s history began in Akron when brothers-in-law John Schaefer and Claude E. Hart bought the M and M Manufacturing Co., a maker of tire patches, tire cement and tire-repair kits. Schaefer and Hart added tire rebuilding to the business in 1915 with the purchase of Akron’s Giant Tire & Rubber Co.
Two years later, they moved the business to Findlay, locating in the buildings of the failed Toledo Findlay Rubber Co. The company changed its name to Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. in 1946 and in 1960 became a publicly held corporation and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.