Extrusion International 3-2026

12 Extrusion International 3/2026 INDUSTRY NEWS Two Different Speed for 2025 and Many Clouds on the Horizon In line with the full-year forecasts published towards the end of last year, the Amaplast Study Center – a trade associ- ation af liated with CONFINDUSTRIA that brings together over 170 manufacturers – estimates that the Italian indus- try of machinery, equipment, and moulds for plastics and rubber closed the year 2025 with a decrease in production on the order of ve percentage points, and with a value of 4.4 billion euros. This represents a slowdown with respect to the previous year, 2024, where a limited deceleration was recorded. For comparison, the Germans – the Italians’ direct competitors – in 2024 had already begun recording a signi cant slump in orders, sales, and exports. Italian exports for the sector, which account for three quarters of production, also recorded a drop of 5%, com- ing in at just barely over 3.4 billion euros. With respect to the weakness in sales abroad, imports of technology recorded a surge of nearly twenty-four percent- age points over 2024, con rming robust domestic demand. This is clearly due partially to the effects of the incentives implemented by the Industry 4.0 and 5.0 Plans, in spite of dif- culties in accessing them and delays in the enactment of the various associated implementation decrees. These issues are also critical in this rst quarter of 2026 in the implementation of measures regarding the new “hyper-amortization” of in- vestments in capital equipment through September 2028. Given these dynamics, the balance of trade is signi cant - ly reduced: after the record of 2.65 billion reached in 2024, it has slipped back to 2.24 billion. The international context in 2025 was characterized prin- cipally by uncertainties caused by the introduction of tariffs by the Trump administration which, beyond the “recipro- cal” component, raise the tariffs on steel and aluminium components in certain types of machinery, components, and moulds for plastics and rubber. The situation was worsened by the progressive devalua- tion of the dollar with respect to the euro. It deteriorated further with the outbreak of the troubling war in theMiddle East, which has triggered an energy crisis that has already begun to have a strong negative impact on the European plastics and rubber processing industry by increasing the costs of natural gas, petroleum, and raw materials and gen- erating uncertainties about the availability of materials. This situation is the source of signi cant concern among Italian manufacturers of plastics and rubber processing ma- chinery, with a host of factors that threaten to compromise the propensity for investment in the domestic market – here understood as both the Italian and the European mar- ket, the latter historically the main destination for Italian exports – and challenges in store with the implementation of the new European Packaging and PackagingWaste Reg- ulation (PPWR). Not surprisingly, sales to Germany, which has always been Italy’s prime trade partner, have fallen for the sec- ond consecutive year. The German plastics and rubber in- dustry recorded losses across the board in 2025 according to estimates by various trade associations: -4% by volume in polymer production; -2% of processed plastic products; -6% for rubber products; and -5% in revenues for machin- ery manufacturers. Exports to processors in France, another major export destination in the EU, have also fallen off. Within the top ten destination markets, these negative trends have fortunately been compensated by an increase in sales to Spain, Poland, and Romania. On the other hand, as of last December, the abovemen- tioned issues have not yet caused the feared collapse of Italian exports to the American market. Instead we have witnessed an increase of almost nine percentage points. U.S. domestic machinery production meets only a limited share of local demand and so American plastics and rub- ber processors have continued to turn to Italian and other manufacturers to acquire advanced technology. Sales to China have continued to increase at a steady pace but those to India even more so, more than tripling in the past ten years: the growing incentives provided by the Make in India programme have generated a strong ac- celeration of demand by local manufacturers, who require increasingly high quality technological systems. So this is a market with notable potentials, most of which have yet to be developed. The recently signed free trade agreement should facilitate this process. On the other hand, two other important countries that recently rejoined the group of top ten destination markets have produced disappointing results for Italian manufac- turers: sales to Turkey have plunged by one third, breaking a ve-year robust growth trend, and those to Brazil per - formed even worse, -45%, although this is relative to the abnormally high peak in 2024 and actually represents a re- turn to the average gures recorded in the previous period. We are naturally looking forward to the implementation of the EU-Mercosur treaty, which could inject new dynamism into trade with Brazil and South America generally. As regards product categories, exports overall have shown lacklustre or diminishing performance for most of the machinery types accounting for the largest share of the total, starting with extruders (falling from nearly 400 to 350 million euros), blow-moulding machines (from 212 to 198 million), exography machines (from 181 to 164 million), and moulds (from 752 to 721 million). Injection moulding machines were the only ones to buck the trend, with sales rising from 194 to 199 million. In this complex situation, Amaplast member companies n - ished the year 2025with a downturn in revenues on the order of ve percentage points while nevertheless succeeding in maintaining employment levels (+0.5%). Within this group, 54%of the companies closed the year with a drop in sales. It has never been so dif cult to venture forecasts for the coming months: there are too many unknowns that con- tinue to arrive and overlap on the international level, ag- gravating the climate of uncertainty that companies are facing, with many historical destination markets character- ized by greater dif culty of access. There will be an opportunity for discussion and updates among international operators in the plastics and rubber