My supplier does not provide the data — what can I do?

What you must do concretely

What is expected of you

When importers or distributors of tyres put products on the market, they depend on data for the product passport that is often not produced in-house but must come from a manufacturer or another link in the supply chain. The ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) sets out in Article 38 what is expected of supply chain actors, and in Article 27 what is expected of a manufacturer. For a company with 10 to 100 employees, this translates into a number of practical points.

Data that must be available must actually be available

Article 38 assumes that supply chain actors provide the information needed to meet the requirements of the regulation. For an importer, this means that their own position in the chain — often that of someone compiling the passport based on another party's data — does not exempt them from the question of whether that data actually exists. In practice: there must be a moment when it is established which party provides which data, and what happens if that does not occur.

The manufacturer remains the point of contact for the accuracy of data

Article 27 places obligations on the manufacturer, including concerning the information that ends up in the passport. For an importer who does not manufacture themselves, this is relevant because it indicates who in the chain bears responsibility for the content — and therefore who can be held accountable when data is missing or incorrect. This is no guarantee that a manufacturer will deliver promptly, but it is the basis on which an importer can rely when requesting data.

Document what has and has not been received

Where the regulation describes a division of responsibilities, there is a task for the company itself in practice: keeping track of what has been requested, when, and what has been received. This is not a legal obligation stated literally in the articles, but a practical implementation of them. Without a record of requested and received data, there is little to fall back on if a supplier later claims that nothing was ever requested, or that delivery did take place.

Where things go wrong in practice

The supplier does not respond to requests. An importer requests data from a manufacturer outside the EU, receives no response, and sends the request a few times again without this being documented. When later asked what steps were taken, there is no overview of dates, requests and (absent) responses.

Data does arrive, but incomplete or inconsistent. A factory provides part of the technical specifications but not the data on materials or test results. The importer compiles the passport with what is available, without recording which parts are missing and why.

Multiple factories, no clear agreement on who supplies what. When companies have the same tyre line manufactured in different factories, it becomes unclear which factory is responsible for which part of the data. This problem relates to the question how data from multiple factories come together in one passport, and without a pre-agreed division of responsibilities, it becomes difficult to determine who is at fault if something goes wrong.

Purchase contracts say nothing about the passport. A contract with a supplier was drawn up years ago and covers price, delivery time and product quality — not the supply of passport data. When that data is not forthcoming, there is no contractual basis to fall back on.

Import from outside the EU without clear agreement on the source of data. When importing tyres from outside the Union, it is not always obvious that the manufacturer knows which data are required under the ESPR, or is willing to supply them in the requested manner. This relates to the broader question of what import from outside the European Union means for your own obligations, regardless of what a foreign supplier does or does not supply.

What you can record

A number of documents and agreements make it easier to demonstrate what has been undertaken when a supplier fails to deliver or delivers incompletely:

• An overview of requests for data: date, recipient, which data requested, and which response (or absence thereof) has been received. This aligns with the question which data are precisely requested from a tire supplier, so that the request itself is also demonstrably complete.

• Correspondence with the supplier, kept as evidence of the attempt to obtain data — even if that attempt yields nothing.

• A clause in the purchase contract concerning the delivery of passport data, including what happens if it is not forthcoming. How this is incorporated into a contract is described under agreements on passport data in the purchase contract; for new contracts this is a logical moment to add this, for existing contracts a point to review.

• A control step upon receipt of data, whereby it is recorded whether the data is complete and plausible. That aligns with the question how the accuracy of supplied data is verified — an incomplete delivery is also a form of "non-delivery" that can be documented.

• A file per product line or supplier, in which it is recorded which data are complete, which are missing, and which steps have been taken to obtain missing data.

This documentation does not change the question of whether and when a supplier actually delivers. What it does do is provide a substantiated picture of what has been done on one's own side — something that has value at the moment when accountability must be given for a passport that is not yet complete.