China aims to return to 10 billion sq m of tiles

The China Association of Sanitary and Building Ceramics has launched a national goal for this year, in line with the Xi Jinping government's "14th Five-Year Plan," to return to 10 billion square meters of tile production by 2025. Is it an achievable goal?

The doubt about the goal's achievability is raised not only by foreign observers but also by Chinese experts. Not only because the local industry is increasingly coming to terms with environmental restrictions but because no one foresees a rapid turnaround in construction demand, which is currently flat.

The Chinese ceramic industry's growth plan would assume that domestic tile demand would rise to 9 billion square meters in a few years. But the numbers are far from actual production and trade volumes. As Chinese government sources report, production has fallen to 8 billion sq. m., well beyond that threshold according to top-rated international studies: the "World production and consumption of ceramic tiles 2020” reports that Chinese production is now less than 6 billion sq. m. and consumption is traveling between 4 and 5 billion sq. m..

To get back to 10 billion sq. m. in the next five years, explains the Cbcsa China website, the market would have to ring up an average annual growth of 5 percent on the domestic front (hardly conceivable given the weak real estate scenario) and go from less than 800 million to 1 billion sq. m. of exported tiles. Implausible.

Over the past three years, ceramic production lines have shrunk dramatically in China and it is estimated that more than 500 companies have exited the industry. The first comprehensive report in English on how many and which companies and brands are now producing tiles and slabs in China, and what investments are being made, will be published soon to shed light on the world's largest ceramic industry (60 percent of global volumes are centered in China) that has always been entrenched behind government statistics that are very different from the numbers in international databases.