Chinese Terracotta Facade Panel Market
Recently ten years has seen China’s economy surging up with a very high speed. Even during the financial crisis in 2008, this emerging economy showed great vitality, mostly due to the infrastructure investment made by Chinese central government and the prosperity of Chinese real estate market.
Benefiting from the prosperous construction market, Chinese construction material market has since entered the “golden age” during which a lot of new and high-end materials are more widely used and promoted by designers, including terracotta panel.
Terracotta panel has widely used in European construction market since late 1980s. However, it is not more than 15 years since it substantially entered Chinese market. Yet the past 5 years has seen rocketing demand for terracotta panel on Chinese market, mainly due to the following reasons:
1. As a new product, terracotta panel not only features diverse and natural colors, but has an environment-friendly property including soundproofing, heat preservation and frost resistance. As China pays more attention to environment protection, more terracotta panel products are being adopts by designers. For many high-end public buildings in China, terracotta panel can also help the projects become more famous and tasteful to some extent.
2. Imported terracotta panel is very expensive, which stimulates a number of China manufacturers of ceramic tile and clay tile to enter terracotta panel field. Terracotta panel technology is comparatively mature, so that terracotta panels which a normal pattern, dimension and colors is not challenging and doesn’t set a high threshold for Chinese manufacturers to produce.
3. China has a high demand and low production cost of construction materials, which attracts several foreign brands to set up local plants or seek OEM collaboration in China. This contributes to the expansion of Chinese terracotta panel market to some extent.
In fact, nowadays Chinese domestic manufacturers are completing their foreign peers on Chinese terracotta panel market. Foreign manufacturers such as NBK and MOEDING has been favored by many large-scale public construction projects for their advantages in brand reputation and specialty terracotta panels. However, by means of low price and home field advantage, domestic manufacturers have acquired more than 90% market share, formulating several mainstream brands including CN, LOPO and TOB.
While facing an increasingly fierce competition on the domestic market, more and more Chinese terracotta panel companies look to the matured overseas markets of terracotta panel including European and US markets. Compared with those brands including ARGETON and CREATON, have Chinese terracotta panel companies prepared themselves well? Although Chinese terracotta panel companies are weaker when it comes to product brand compared with those international brands, Chinese terracotta panel products are very cost effective. As Chinese terracotta panel companies continue to improve the product technology, definitely Chinese terracotta panel will have its own place on international markets in the future.
