Euromap: Machinery sales down 10 percent in 2019, 5 percent in 2020

Düsseldorf, Germany — There is no hiding from the economic and environmental challenges facing the plastics industry as K 2019 opens: Global plastics and rubber machinery industry sales are projected to drop 10 percent this year and 5 percent in 2020.

At least that"s according to European and German plastics and rubber machinery industry trade associations at an Oct. 15 kickoff news conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, the day before the start of 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 percent to 33.1 billion euros this year and fall a further 5 percent to 31.5 billion euros in 2020.

Sales reached 36.8 billion euros 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 Kühmann, secretary general of Euromap.

The group estimates that sales in the Euromap region will also drop 10 percent this year to 14 billion euros and fall another 5 percent in 2020 to 13.3 billion euros.

Germany and Italy will face similar declines, it estimated, with German plastics machinery sales dropping from 7.9 billion euros in 2018 to 6.7 billion euros next year. Italy is projected to see a drop from 2.9 billion euros last year to 2.5 billion euros in 2020.

Euromap President Luciano Anceschi said several factors were leading to the global slowdown in machinery sales, after a decadelong 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 will drop 7.5 percent this year to the world, 6.4 percent to the United States and 12 percent 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 percent since 2010.

Other machinery executives also said public questions around plastics waste and sustainability are hurting the industry"s bottom line.

Ulrich Reifenhäuser, 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 Reifenhäuser, who is also chief sales officer of German extrusion machinery maker Reifenhäuser 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 wants to reduce the amount of virgin plastic used in beverage packaging by one-third by the middle of the next decade, and Unilever plc said in early October it wanted to cut virgin plastics used by half by 2025.

Still, machinery executives did say they see some opportunities for plastics in discussions about the circular economy and sustainability.

Euromap Vice President Michael Baumeister noted European Commission"s plans to dramatically boost the use of recycled plastic in products, from an estimated 2.5 million metric tons now to 10 million tonnes by 2025.

Anceschi said that development could help the image of plastics, and Euromap said in an Oct. 15 news release it sees opportunities to make the case that plastics have a lower carbon dioxide footprint than other materials.

At the news conference, Euromap officials also released results of a pilot study tracking global plastics flows and said it was the first to document it comprehensively from the industry perspective.

It found that about 250 million tonnes of post-consumer plastic waste is generated annually, out of about 390 million tonnes of plastics used each year.

It estimated that 173 million tonnes of that is either landfilled or sent to energy recovery facilities, and that 63 million tonnes are disposed of improperly through illegal dumping and a further 14 million tonnes are "leakage" such as litter.

The environmental and business challenges for the industry make it unlike other K fairs in recent memory, according to Euromap"s Kühmann.

"This K show is completely different because we"re having a difficult economic situation, we have a bad image, we have an automotive industry which is not investing at this point, and I expect the packaging sector to drop down due to the bad image," he said in an interview after the news conference.

Source  www.plasticsnews.com, edit : handler