Textar brake pads and discs in the UAE

Textar does not exist as a company. It is a brand, and the company behind it is TMD Friction Group GmbH, registered at Schlebuscher Strasse 99 in Leverkusen and recorded at the Cologne district court under HRB 118943. TMD gives its own scale as around 4,200 employees across twelve countries, twenty-three locations and four continents.

The ownership chain is where the errors are. TMD was bought from Pamplona Capital Management by Nisshinbo Holdings of Tokyo in September 2011. It stayed a Nisshinbo company for twelve years. Then in August 2023 TMD announced a new investor, AEQUITA, a privately owned industrial group headquartered in Munich, and the acquisition completed in early December 2023 once the regulatory clearances were through. TMD said at the time that it would remain an independent entity with its own brand, and an AEQUITA partner joined as co-chief executive.

That change is nearly three years old and a large amount of the material online has not caught up with it. Trade pages, encyclopaedia summaries and product listings still describe TMD Friction as a subsidiary of Nisshinbo Holdings. It is not, and anybody checking this quickly will be told otherwise. TMD's own imprint page names no parent at all, which is why the ownership has to be read off the announcements rather than off a profile page.

There is a second, more basic error worth heading off. Textar has never been a Federal-Mogul or Tenneco brand. That is Ferodo. The two get merged because both are old European friction names and both sit inside larger groups, but they are on opposite sides of the industry's ownership map.

TMD sells six aftermarket brands: Textar, Pagid, Bendix, Mintex, Don and Cobreq. That matters at a counter here because two more of them, Mintex and Bendix, are also names a UAE buyer will meet, and all three are served by the same TMD regional branch. Three familiar badges, one supplier behind them.

TMD is also unusual in publishing an explicit ladder. It describes its brand portfolio as spanning from budget over standard up to premium, and it places two of the six on that ladder by name: Textar is the premium brand and Don is the value one, described as high-quality brake pads and discs without the premium prices.

What TMD does not publish is where the other four sit. Mintex and Bendix are not positioned anywhere on the ladder on TMD's own pages, and we are not going to infer their position from price, from anecdote or from the order the brands appear in a list. Textar being premium is a first-party fact. Everything else about the ordering is guesswork, and guesswork about a tier is exactly the kind of invented structure this segment refuses to publish.

Textar's own coverage claim, for what it is worth as a manufacturer's claim about itself, is more than ninety-nine per cent of the car parc, built on some fifty thousand friction formulations drawing on nearly eight hundred ingredients developed over three decades.

Textar's two headline pad ranges are not a good and a better. They are two different friction philosophies aimed at two different populations of car, and choosing between them by price would be choosing wrongly.

Textar apad is the Asian-vehicle range. Textar describes it as precision-engineered for Asian vehicles, built on copper-free NAO friction material, and covering passenger cars, SUVs and light commercial vehicles across all powertrain technologies. NAO stands for non-asbestos organic, a friction family that generally trades some outright bite for quietness and gentler treatment of the disc, which is broadly how Japanese and Korean vehicle makers have specified brakes for years. Given how much of the UAE car parc is Japanese and Korean, this is the range most people reading this page will be buying.

Textar epad+ is the European-vehicle range. Textar states that it is one hundred per cent free of copper and antimony, that it ships with Q plus dampening shims, that it is up to thirty per cent quieter than competitor pads, that it produces less brake dust and that it is kinder to the disc. The quietness figure is Textar's own comparative claim rather than an independent measurement, and it should be read as such.

The point that survives all the detail is simple. If the badge on your car is Japanese, Korean or Chinese, the range Textar built for it is apad. If it is German, French, Italian or British, it is epad+. Buying the European pad for an Asian car because it sounds like the more serious product is a specification error dressed as an upgrade.

This deserves a section of its own because it is the one Textar fact with a direct Middle East statement attached, and because the statement is narrower than it first appears.

TMD's own launch announcement of October 2024 says the new range would be offered in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and Africa, starting in October 2024. That is a manufacturer naming this region in its own market list, which is more than most brands in this segment ever do.

Textar's own apad page then adds a caveat that has to travel with it: availability of apad brake pads may vary by country. So what is sourced is that TMD intended the range for this region from October 2024, and what is not sourced is that any given part number is on a shelf in Dubai today. Those are different claims and only the first one has a source behind it.

The practical version is to ask the counter for apad by name if the car is Asian, and to accept that a shop may hold the general Textar range instead. It is not a sign that anything is wrong; it is a distribution question, and the manufacturer said as much.

Textar publishes a specific anti-counterfeit measure: a PROriginal seal printed on Textar product packaging, which the company presents as the way a customer identifies a counterfeit.

That is worth flagging precisely because it is rare. Across the braking brands a UAE buyer commonly meets, this is the only manufacturer-published counterfeit measure we could find. Several very large brake names publish nothing of the kind, and we are not going to invent a hologram or a font test for them to fill the gap; a made-up authentication test is worse than none, because a reader who applies it wrongly will reject a genuine part with total confidence.

What a seal on a box can and cannot do is also worth being clear about. It gives you something to look for and something to be suspicious about when it is missing or badly printed. It does not certify the friction material inside, and a counterfeit sophisticated enough to copy a pad is capable of copying a print. The seal is a first check, not the last one.

There is real, reported, UAE-specific enforcement activity around counterfeit car parts, and brake friction features in it. This section reports it carefully because it is easy to report it wrongly.

Al-Futtaim Toyota, working with UAE government authorities, ran raids on dealers in counterfeit parts in Dubai and Sharjah. Among the goods seized or destroyed were nearly six thousand brake pads. Separately, the Ministry of Economy carried out 4,444 inspections in the first half of 2023, finding 620 infractions for commercial fraud, imitation and counterfeiting, and Dubai Police's economic crimes department has handled 1,297 cases since 2019. UAE press has reported counterfeit brake pads made from dried grass among the fakes recovered.

Two things must be said alongside that. The raids concerned counterfeit Toyota-branded parts, not counterfeit Textar, and nothing in the reporting connects this brand to them. And the widely quoted total value of goods seized in those raids covers every part type involved, not brake pads specifically, so anyone attaching the headline figure to brake friction is putting the right number against the wrong noun.

What none of it supports is a claim about how common counterfeit brake friction is in this country. An enforcement figure counts what inspectors found; it says nothing about the size of the pool they were fishing in, and a rising count can mean better enforcement just as easily as a worse market. Nobody behind this page holds a prevalence figure, so this page prints none. Putting an invented percentage under a heading about fake brakes would be a fraud of exactly the type the heading is warning about.

Three gaps in the published record are worth naming, because in each case an obvious-looking answer exists and is not sourced.

Textar publishes no founding year. TMD's more than 145 years belongs to the group, and the eighteen-seventies origin sometimes quoted belongs to the British friction business rather than to this brand. The Leverkusen origin date that circulates for Textar is not on either company's own site, so this page does not carry one.

Textar names no original-equipment customer, as covered above, and TMD does not say which of its sites builds which part number. It also does not say where the stock that reaches this region originates. Nobody in this segment publishes that, which means any sentence about where a UAE Textar box was made would be an invention.

For what it is worth in this market, several UAE parts businesses do record carrying this brand in their own stock records. That is a record of what a shop said about itself when it was last checked rather than a guarantee of what is on the shelf this week, and a shelf turns over faster than any record of it.