Ceramic Tile Market Forecast Analysis TREND 2024—2028 World Outlookby Macroarea & Single Countries Year 2024

In the period from mid-2023 to the end of present 2024, a new source of global geopolitical instability has been added to the depressive effects of the ongoing war in Ukraine: Israel is waging a war against the Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas and filo- Iranian Hezbollah with the military invasion of Gaza and with frequent air raids on Lebanon, on Syria and even on Iran. The conflict has already produced tens of thousands of civilian victims as well as a serious humanitarian crisis with movements of war refugees on the borders of the theater of conflict. The solution to the pandemic crisis has therefore been replaced by this new powerful source of macroeconomic uncertainty involving the entire Middle East. Among the shadows, some feeble light: the credible commitment of the two main western Central Banks (ECB and the FED) to remove inflationary expectations of agents from the economic system through money tightening have succeeded, so that monetary policy rates can now be directed downwards in a more accommodating area. Another potential source of uncertainty lies on the fact that the newly elected President Trump has, among his political programs, the plan to rise import duties on goods from Europe. The implied chain of duties and counter-duties (already experimented by USA with China) can significantly lower volumes of tradables through the Atlantic, so generating also changes in patterns of trade and, at least potentially, on exchange rates and capital flows. However, the combined effects of geo-political uncertainty and high interest rates has strongly reduced the speed of growth in 2023, after a couple of years of steep recovery. This new scenario, better than last year, gives world economies a new positive although moderate trend of medium-term growth, and hence it’s also having a significant impact on the construction industry and ceramic tile production and consumption. Summing up, it has led us to revise our global forecasts for the sector upwards (to 2.2% for global tile production and 2.5% for global consumption), both estimates being more than one percentage point higher than in last year’s issue. The main drivers of such new production recovery will be especially Africa, Middle East (among uncertainty), Extra-EU European countries and North and Latin America; EU will grow exactly at the average speed, while Asia production will grow at a lower pace than the average global. About consumption, once again Africa leads, followed by South America and Extra-EU European countries. Under average the growth of tile consumption in all the other geographical areas. In particular, Europe, Asia and Middle East will show poorly dynamic markets: China, the undisputed oligopolist of the world ceramic market, is still experimenting a big slowdown of construction sector, with a sharp decline in residential and public constructions’ investments. This will lead to a contraction both in production and in consumption of tiles (-0.9% and -1.6%, respectively). At the opposite extreme, India will gain a growing share in the global market, with its production growing on average 5.9% yearly until 2028, totalizing more than 800 million square meters of tiles production (near to the same volume in consumption). 05 Overall, the world ceramic market looks set to grow by only more than 2 billion square meters within five years, an encouraging result if compared with the last 3 years, although lower than past years’ expansions. The analysis starts by using a macroeconomic approach to describe all the factors that will limit 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 energy prices now slowly going back to normal to the still present 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 impacting the sector. After the descriptive part, space will be left for the numbers, organized in easy-toview 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 analysed. We chose to exclude single marginal areas where the lack of official data and estimates would have made the projections too risky. All data are finally summarized in tables with rankings of the main producing and consuming countries based on the expected change over the next five years.