According to the official statistics processed by the Confindustria Marmomacchine Studies Center, 2019 began with an encouraging return to growth in Italy’s exports of machines, installations, equipment and tools for extracting and processing stone materials.
After a 2018 in which the Italian techno-stone industry’s foreign sales had dropped by 10.5% from the peak in 2017 (from 1,255 to 1,121 million euros), in the first quarter of this year exports in fact grew by 3.9% compared to the first quarter of the previous year, for revenue of 239.6 million euros.
With 31.7 million euros worth of purchases the United States was once again, for this quarter of 2019, the main destination market for Italian stone-working machinery and equipment, despite a slide (-2.6%) compared to the first quarter of the previous year. There was big growth in sales to India (+48.4%, to 17.5 million), the United Kingdom (+180.1%, to 17 million) and Germany (+28.3%, to 15.9 million).
More generally, in line with the trend already seen last year, there was growth on all of Italy’s main European markets: Spain (+6.3%, to 18.8 million), Greece (+141.9%, to 10.1 million), Portugal (+184.8%, to 9.8 million) and France (+33% to 7.3 million). Good signals for our exports, after a negative 2018, also came from two important non-EU markets like Algeria (+141%, to 10.3 million) and Mexico (+123%, to 7.2 million).