India global growth leader, also in the ceramic industry

IMF Outlook: +6.1% the expected trend of India's GDP this year, +6.8% in 2024

Mecs study center analysis confirms momentum: +7.9% tile production CAGR forecast

The latest data from the International Monetary Fund confirm it: India is the country with the highest growth potential in the world, and despite the difficulties experienced during 2022 (with a collapse of macroeconomic indicators since spring), it will return to lead the race of the international economy as early as this year, with a +6.1% GDP (more than double the world average of +2.9%) and reaching +6.8% in 2024. India will thus strengthen its gap from the rest of the advanced economies but - even more noteworthy - from China, which will instead grow, again according to the IMF Outlook, by +5.2% in 2023 and +4.5% in 2024.

The competition between the two Asian giants and the two opposing models of government, society and economy is reflected also in the ceramic industry, where both countries play a leading role globally: together India and China are worth 60 percent of the world's ceramic tile production and almost as much of consumption. The fact that Xi Jinping's country has already lost the scepter of the world's most populous country to New Delhi (here World Bank's data on population dynamics) suggests that the very strong dynamism of the ceramic industries in the Morbi district, accompanied by the increase in population and urbanization in India's megacities, will see the primacy won by the Chinese in the global ceramic industry during the new Millennium fade in the coming years.
This is clearly told by two reports just produced by the Mecs study center, "India, ceramic tile market" and "World forecast analysis - Ceramic tile market 2022-2026." This is the first in-depth study on the Indian ceramic industry, the result of the collaboration between the Italian study center (for thirty years a privileged observer of the sector working in the heart of the most important ceramic cluster in the world, that of Sassuolo) and the Indian producers of the Morbi district: all Indian market values have been recalculated and more than 800 Indian ceramic manufacturing companies have been sounded out. India, with 2.5 billion sqm of ceramic tile production is now the world's second largest tile-producing country and the third largest exporter (half a billion sqm exported).
Its development has been very fast: the number of production lines has doubled within seven years (exceeding 1,000 lines) and so has production, which has increased 15 times in the last decade. After peaking in 2021, the Indian ceramics industry was also affected first by the Covid effect, then by the consumption crisis, the halt to international trade, rising energy prices and inflation, but the medium-term forecast confirms India as the country that will drive the world ceramics industry even between now and 2026, with nearly 8 percent more growth each year in production levels (+7.9%), well above the +3.3 percent global CAGR and four times the pace of growth of the Chinese ceramics industry.

These are the numbers from the latest edition of MECS' forecast report on more than 90 ceramic producing and consuming countries. And it is also clear from this study that beyond India, the other Asian tigers promise to surprise competitors in the global ceramics supply chain in the coming years: countries that are young, with young industries (in India more than half of the 800 ceramic companies analyzed were born in the last ten years) and where governments, such as Modi's, have launched ambitious infrastructure and construction investment plans.