MOSCOW (MRC) -- Global plastics and rubber machinery industry sales are projected to drop 10% this year and 5% in 2020, said European-rubber-journal.
That’s according to European and German plastics and rubber machinery industry trade associations, speaking at K 2019. The Euromap association, an umbrella group of nine national European plastics and rubber machinery trade groups, projected that global sales for the machinery sector will drop 10% to EUR33.1bn this year, with a further 5% fall to EUR31.5bn in 2020.
Sales reached EUR36.8bn worldwide in 2018. "At the bottom line, we want to say that not only will we have a challenging 2019, but 2020 will be challenging, too," said Thorsten Kuhmann, secretary general of Euromap.
The group estimates that sales in the Euromap region will also drop 10% this year to €14bn and fall another 5% in 2020 to EUR13.3bn. Germany and Italy will face similar declines, it estimated, with German plastics machinery sales dropping from EUR7.9bn in 2018 to €6.7bn next year. Italy is projected to see a drop from EUR2.9bn last year to EUR2.5bn in 2020.
Euromap President Luciano Anceschi said several factors were leading to the global slowdown in machinery sales, after a decade-long streak of growing sales: a declining auto market worldwide, the trade conflict between the United States and China, Brexit, and environmental questions around plastics.
He noted drops in exports to major markets from Europe. Euromap projects machinery exports from the 28 European Union nations to the rest of the world will fall 7.5% this year, 6.4% to the United States and 12% to China.
Anceschi did put that drop in a broader perspective, saying that during the growth streak in the European plastics machinery industry, production had risen 59% since 2010. Other machinery executives also said public questions around plastics waste and sustainability are hurting the industry's bottom line.
Ulrich Reifenhauser, chairman of the VDMA Plastics and Rubber Machinery Association, told journalists that those concerns are leading to deselection of plastics in other industries, like consumer goods.
"The tendency to replace plastics is fairly strong," said Reifenhauser, who is also chief sales officer of German extrusion machinery maker Reifenhauser GmbH & Co. KG Maschinenfabrik. "I don't like that, because I like to see growth and I like to sell machines and there are good reasons to take plastics. "It's the real and bloody situation; it's the potential to lose business, to lose basis, for machine selling," he said.
Major consumer product companies have announced moves away from plastic. For example, PepsiCo Inc. said in September it wanted to reduce the amount of virgin plastic used in beverage packaging by one-third by the middle of the next decade. Unilever Plc said in early October it wanted to cut virgin plastics use in half by 2025.
Still, machinery executives did say they see some opportunities for plastics in discussions about the circular economy and sustainability.
As MRC informed earlier, Russia's output of products from polymers rose in September by 5.2% year on year. However, this figure increased by 1.7% year on year in the first nine months of 2019. According to the Russian Federal State Statistics Service, September production of unreinforced and non-combined films was slightly over 107,300 tonnes, compared to 110,000 tonnes a month earlier. Output of films products grew in January-September 2019 by 9.1% year on year to 893,000 tonnes.