Sponsored by the Tile Association

The ACIMAC Research Department has recently released its ‘Financial Statement Analysis – World Ceramic Tile Manufacturers’. This contains new 2017 financial data for a sample of world ceramic tile manufacturers analysed by the Acimac Research Department.

This reveals a further improvement in Italy’s performance with respect to its international competitors, including growth in both production efficiency and profitability. However, sales growth slowed with respect to the exceptional results of 2016. The improvement in Italian companies’ results is particularly significant compared to those of the non-Italian companies in the Acimac world sample.

53 per cent of Italian companies reported turnover growth during the year, although this was significantly down on the 80 per cent of the boom year of 2016. Non-Italian companies did not fare so well, with 40 per cent enjoying turnover growth, compared to 60% the previous year. 45% of Italian companies posted a profit in 2017 (compared to 85% in 2016), slightly higher than the 44% of their foreign counterparts.

With regard to overall sector profitability, both Return on Investment and Return on Sales grew by almost half a percentage point. Moreover, Italian companies succeeded in maintaining a constant labour cost to turnover ratio despite the very high level of labour costs per employee (which increased by more than 2,000 euros to an average of 57,600 euros per employee per annum compared to the 55,500 euros of the three-year period 2015-2017).