Africa, destination for global tile exports

The African continent is the third largest macro-destination area for global ceramic tile exports, accounting for more than 10 percent of global tile exports.

However, in the two years 2017-2018, there was a slowdown in exports, mainly caused by the export flows from the three main exporters in the area, which presented different or even opposite trends.

It should be noted that China, India, and Spain alone account for the majority of total exports to Africa (over 230 million sq m in 2018).

However, while India and Spain have seen growing trends (+48% and +13% respectively), China, by far the main exporter to Africa, has experienced a sharp slowdown in exports (-20%).

This very negative result should, however, be downplayed considering that, in part, the Chinese slowdown depends on the attained greater productive autonomy of some African countries and that this productive autonomy is manifested through the substitution of exports with local production made available precisely by Chinese FDI (foreign direct investment). The Chinese result, therefore, represents not only a slowdown in exports to Africa, which has indeed occurred in part but also the effect of a specific Chinese strategy of offshoring to African countries with greater trade and investment ties with China.

Although the penetration of the top three tile exporters in Africa covers substantially all countries, the main export flows appear rather segmented:

Table 1: The top three tile exporters in Africa and their top 10 destination countries.

As shown in the table, China and India share several export destinations (South Africa, Senegal, Kenya, the United Republic of Tanzania and Angola) while Spain has a greater presence in North Africa and the Maghreb. All three countries have significant export flows to Senegal and Nigeria.