"The road of automobile industry development is a long one. East Africa is currently only at the stage of copying the gourd by its shape. Perhaps tires are our only major advantageous component that can be exported!" Ernst sighed.
So-called tires were rubber tires. Germany and Austria relied on imports for all their rubber, so rubber production and processing was one of East Africa's core advantageous industries, much like sisal. However, sisal had other producing regions around the world; East Africa was simply the place most suited to its growth.
East Africa's rubber-processing industry had only begun a few years ago, but East Africa—or rather, the Hohenzollern Conglomerate—held the patent for hollow pneumatic tires. Moreover, East Africa's greatest advantage now was that most rubber production had been monopolized by East Africa, the result of Ernst's advance preparations.
It would take time for South American countries to react. After all, expanding production and establishing new plantations required immense effort and time.
In fact, only after East African rubber became available for large-scale export did South American rubber-producing regions, especially Brazil, discover East Africa's major move. East Africa had concealed it too well, catching them completely off guard.
This was one effect of East Africa's closed-door policy. Nearly all of East Africa's rubber-producing regions lay inland. Even the nearest coastal plain producing regions were two or three hundred kilometers from the Indian Ocean, and other countries could not enter East Africa to investigate. Thus, before East Africa's first batch of rubber exports, no one knew that East Africa had already surpassed Brazil to become the world's largest rubber-growing country.
The Brazilian Government did not react too strongly to this, because only a few years had passed since East Africa secretly introduced rubber tree seeds, yet the British had already copied East Africa's