After a 6,4% quantity growth in 2021, the Aluminium Profile Systems market in Europe (windows, doors, facades, sliding systems, conservatories and sun protection) kept gaining in 2022, but at lower rate of 2,4%. Despite a good start, the market started to slow down a bit in the second half of 2022, mainly due to political instability caused by the Russia-Ukraine war tensions and inflationary pressures, which led to an extreme volatility of demand over the year. “After replenishing their stock in 2021 to cope with rising prices, producers of final products had less need to order new profiles” explains Dr. Armandi, the author of the study.

Norway and Italy overperforming

Best performers in 2022 have been Norway and Italy. In particular, the Norwegian market strongly benefited by public projects resumed after being cancelled during the pandemic, an effect which will play out also in 2023. Meanwhile, the Italian market overperformed due to government subsidies for renovation of old residential building. Contrary, despite that the German market counts for almost one quarter of all profiles sold in 2022, slightly underperformed relative to the European average growth. For the whole EUTOP10 profile market, Interconnection predicts the quantity will keep increasing an yearly average of 0,3% for the next three years with a stronger rebound expected only in 2025.

Prices kept rising for all aluminium profile solutions

Even though the quantity sold did not go up a lot, the industry turnover still benefitted from rising prices and managed to reach over 4 billion euros, that is, a 10,4% growth compared to 2021. Higher prices, however, contributed a bit on the decline of demand, especially in the second semester. The reason is the political instability that caused inflationary pressure over the European economy and made the general public more price sensitive than in 2021. As a consequence, the average price kept rising again by +7,5% in 2022. However, as aluminium world prices start to get back to the pre-Covid levels, Interconnection predicts that average price for aluminium profiles will finally start to stabilize from 2023 and total turnover will fall by an yearly average of -1,6% up to 2025.

In terms of products groups, the most popular solutions, windows, overperformed a bit and went from 39,3% to 39,6% quantity shares. Additionally, facades and doors reached quantity shares of 24,9% and 21,3%, respectively. Among the major companies in terms of turnover, we find Schüco, Hydro and Corialis.