The dilemma of China’s ceramic tile production in the second half of 2024
Since the first half of 2024, the domestic ceramic industry has been affected by overcapacity and sluggish markets, and the kiln opening rate in many production areas has been low.
By the middle of the year, ceramic companies in various places stopped kilns and reduced production due to poor sales.
Most companies stopped to reduce production and sales pressure, but some companies always have difficulty starting again after stopping production. The era of great development of the ceramic industry has passed. Now companies are competing for intelligent manufacturing level, quality level, and digital management level.
In recent years, ceramic equipment companies represented by Keda have carried out a lot of digital transformation and improvement for ceramic factories. In this year’s shutdown wave, most of these ceramic factories have maintained a good level of production and sales, and even if they are stopped, only one or two old production lines are stopped.
Through observation, it can be found that these production lines that are still in normal operation have some common points, that is, they perform well in production costs, energy efficiency, and comprehensive benefits.
1 Capacity reduction quality improvement and efficiency improvement have become the mainstream
In 2023, the national ceramic tile output continued its downward trend, reaching 6.73 billion square meters, a year-on-year decrease of 8.0%.
Under this circumstance, the newly added domestic tile production capacity has shrunk significantly, and the number of completely new production lines has decreased.
Most of them are demolishing the old and building the new, or upgrading the original production line.
Whether it is demolishing the old and building the new or upgrading and upgrading, ceramic factories have higher requirements for indicators such as production line cost, energy efficiency, and production quality.
2 The key to replacing old global production capacity is to adapt to local conditions
The difficulties encountered by China’s building ceramics industry are not isolated cases.
In recent years, the global building ceramics industry has been affected by the economic environment.
Many ceramic companies in various countries have stopped kilns and reduced production, and they are also reducing investment in new production lines.
On the other hand, the existing ceramic production lines in overseas countries generally take a long time to build, and they do not have advantages in terms of output, efficiency, energy consumption, production costs, etc.
In the future, the transformation and upgrading of old production lines will become the focus of the development of the global ceramics industry.
For upstream companies, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
With the development of the industry, the supply model of the whole plant and the whole line has gradually become the mainstream of the industry. Only with the output capacity of the whole plant and the whole line can companies grab orders.
In addition, most of the old production lines used the Italian standard before. If the company can only provide the Chinese standard, it is likely to be unsuitable.
