Ceramic Tile Market Forecast Analysis. TREND 2022—2026

SUMMARY. With the covid pandemic emergency over in much of the world, most of the world's economies face new and unexpected problems in 2022, from the conflict situation on Europe's eastern border, to rising energy costs, to the emergence of inflation after years of stable prices. This new world scenario is also having a significant impact on the construction industry and ceramic tile production and consumption, and has led us to revise our global forecasts for the sector downwards, especially for European coun- tries and North America. Despite all the new challenges at international level, China will remain the undisputed oligopolist of the world ceramic market, with almost half of the shares in both production and consumption of ceramic tiles, close to reaching 10 billion sqm; India, at a great distance, will manufacture more than 3 billion sqm in 2026, but nearly one third of it will be exported (thus becoming the world's leading exporter in terms of volume), followed by Brazil and Spain, Iran and Vietnam. Overall, the world ceramic market looks set to grow by 3.1 billion square meters with- in five years, a growth rate of 3.3% if read in terms of production, 3.2% if we look at demand, almost two points less if compared with our previous forecasts. Asia will strengthen its dominance in terms of production, not as an area of consumption. Africa confirms as the region with the greatest dynamism (starting from lower absolute levels and with a considerable gap to make up), the surprise - already tasted in the last edi- tion of "World Production and Consumption of ceramic tiles" - is the speed with which Latin American countries have resumed growth after a period of stability. The analysis starts by using a qualitative approach to describe all the factors that will condition both the supply and the demand of ceramic tiles in the next few years, factors that have been considered in this outlook and transformed into variables of our econometric forecasting model: from population and wealth trends to geopolitical tensions, from the impact of rising energy prices to the scarcity of raw materials, from the ups and downs of the construction sector to logistics performance and the new international standards of sustainability for materials in the living sector. After the descriptive part, space will be left for the numbers, organized in easy-to- view charts, first by macro-areas, then by single countries (double charts for countries that are both producers and consumers, single charts for countries that consume but produce negligible quantities of ceramics). In the report, a total of 91 countries are an- alysed. We chose to exclude areas where the lack of official data and estimates would have made the projections too risky. In closing, however, all data are summed up in summary tables with rankings of the main producing and consuming countries based on the expected change over the next five years.