Italian cement industry suffered a cliff-like decline in production, with the national cement production falling by 18% year-on-year, in sharp contrast to the slight decline of only 1% in January, which directly dragged the cumulative output growth rate in the first two months of this year into the 11% year-on-year contraction range. This decline far exceeds the normal range of seasonal fluctuations, marking a grim start to the Italian cement industry at the beginning of the year, which is facing the simultaneous weakness of internal and external demand.
From the demand side, the collapse of production in February was mainly caused by the superposition of double pressures. In the domestic market, bad weather has directly inhibited construction activities, resulting in a significant weakening of local cement consumption; in the overseas market, the continued downturn in export demand has further reduced the shipping space of production enterprises. This double blow of "domestic demand is dragged down by weather and external demand is shrunk by orders" makes Italian cement plants generally face the operating difficulties of insufficient orders and declining capacity utilization in February. The
delayed release of January import and export data provides more concrete evidence for this judgment. Italian cement exports plunged 42% year-on-year to 56900 tons, with an export unit price of 100 euros per ton, while imports fell 14% year-on-year to 166200 tons, with an import unit price of 85 euros per ton. The sharp contraction of exports directly confirms the deterioration of the external demand environment, while the synchronous contraction of import scale shows that the activity of the domestic construction market is also insufficient to support additional external procurement. It is worth noting that the export unit price is significantly higher than import unit price, reflecting the high-end positioning of Italian cement in the international market, but the high price strategy may aggravate the loss of export competitiveness in the current weak demand environment.
In a seeming paradox, cement prices rose 4% in February from a year earlier on the back of a sharp contraction in production. This deviation from the pattern of "falling volume and rising price" usually points to the logic of cost-driven inflation-the rise in energy, raw materials or logistics costs forces enterprises to maintain price increases when demand shrinks to hedge against the rise in production costs; at the same time, it may also reflect the supporting effect of surplus capacity on prices after the contraction of the supply side. Whatever the mechanism, the combination of rising prices and falling production means that the Italian cement industry is experiencing typical "stagflationary" pressures, in which weak demand coincides with rising costs.
Taken together, the 11% cumulative production decline in the first two months of this year has clearly outlined the fundamental challenges facing the Italian cement industry. In the short term, the fading of weather factors may bring marginal improvement to the domestic market after March, but the structural weakness of the external market revealed by the 42% plunge in export demand and the cost pressures behind the sustained price rise may not resolve themselves in the short term. For Italian cement enterprises, how to balance capacity utilization, inventory level and price strategy under the pattern of weak internal and external demand will be the core business issue throughout 2026.
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