Following last year’s tempered but still momentous 40th anniversary celebrations, the 2024 edition of Cersaie arrived in an atmosphere of increased uncertainty. Global economic volatility, exacerbated by multiple international conflicts, has had a pronounced effect on the tiling industry, and this precarity has raised many questions around the role and viability of exhibitions, European manufacturing, sustainability and innovation.
While the answers to those questions will ultimately be resolved in the market, Cersaie 2024 made a powerful affirmative case for their vital ongoing importance. As an exhibition, it brought together often disparate industry strands in a cohesive and thoughtful way, while presenting an engrossing program of live events and speeches. As a platform for European manufacturing, it offered companies the ability to put their products in front of nearly 100,000 visitors, with the close-up, tactile experience a key quality differentiator. And as a barometer for both sustainability and innovation in the industry, the show was once again the place where many manufacturers chose to launch new ranges, highlighting their updated technical capabilities alongside environmental and social commitments.
The 41st edition of Cersaie perhaps didn’t herald the roaring return to form the industry has hoped for since 2023, but it did see manufacturers once again demonstrate creativity and resilience with an enormous and varied array of very fine products. Much like last year’s show, the design focus for 2024 landed strongly on neutral and natural effects, with Portland stone and Travertine once again seeming to be the most sought-after looks. Where variation did occur, it often appeared as a detail or relief element incorporated into one of these more traditional options.
Of course, more of the same is hardly a problem when the quality of the effects is so impressive, and recent advancements in printing technology have brought porcelain tiles to a point where they’re near indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. It’s unlikely 2025 will be a markedly easier year than 2024 for the tiling sector overall, and manufacturers will certainly need to weather many more storms yet, but as a stage for both the industry’s tenacity and its ingenuity, Cersaie 2024 played its role perfectly yet again.
The European view
Taking place from 23-27 September at the Bologna exhibition centre, the show stretched over 15 halls and a gargantuan 145,000sqm of total floor space. A total of 606 companies exhibited at the show, while some 95,000 visitors attended across the five-day event, with both numbers representing a slight decrease in comparison to last year’s figures. (According to the event’s organisers, the decline in visitor attendance was nearly exclusively down to a drop in Italian attendees, with the number of international visitors remaining stable).
The recently appointed chairman of Confindustria Ceramica, Augusto Ciarrocchi, said of the fair: “Despite the highly challenging international context, Cersaie’s exceptional capacity to attract visitors enabled exhibiting companies to really make the most of their investments. The exhibitors were particularly impressed by the quality of the visitors present at the show, including distributors, architects and real estate operators. The Italian ceramic industry continues to lead world markets thanks to the unparalleled value of its design and key characteristics such as sustainability and respect for workers’ rights.”
There was a strong focus throughout the press conference on emerging markets for Italian and European ceramic production, with speakers highlighting the African continent as a powerful growth market for the industry.
He did point to several challenges facing the Italian and broader European tile manufacturing sector, which also made up a bulk of the discussion at the show’s international press conference on the first evening. Primary among these was the issue of fair competition between European manufacturers and their counterparts particularly in Asian nations including China and India. Ciarrocchi said: “We face growing challenges, including aggressive dumping practices by a number of countries and a loss of competitiveness caused by ideologically-driven application of regulations such as the ETS, which while consistent with shared EU environmental goals place an excessive burden on our companies.”
Confindustria Ceramica has recently criticised the ETS, which is an EU scheme that charges companies for their carbon emissions based on a system of “allowances” which are purchased at auction. The Italian organisation has suggested this scheme, while well-meaning, has had disproportionately harmful effects on the ceramics industry, and discourages domestic manufacturing.
Despite these more apprehensive overtones, the conference was broadly very bullish about the event and its place in the ceramics market. Emilio Mussini, head of promotional activities at Confindustria Ceramica, drew particular attention to the large programme of events at this edition of Cersaie. Reportedly 1,200 participants attended the Keynote Lecture by Pritzker Prize laureate, Riken Yamato, while hundreds of architects attended other events in the show’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” programme.
While all of this was certainly interesting context, the main event (as always) remained the tiles. Unsurprisingly, companies once again brought their A-game to Cersaie, subtly developing and modifying trends from the past several years while keeping the technical and environmental benefits of porcelain at the forefront of their presentations.
Grand to granular
Large format has perhaps been the most obvious trend of recent years, and it showed no sign of slowing at this year’s Cersaie. Italian manufacturers once again demonstrated mastery over these slab sizes, with companies like Casalgrande Padana, Atlas Concorde and Lea Ceramiche all introducing new large format ranges at this year’s show. As previously mentioned, these ranges largely fell into the neutral and natural design categories, with recreations of Portland stone and Travertine remaining dominant, in addition to concrete and metal-effects.
The aesthetic stand-outs among this year’s large format offering were the marble designs from companies like Fondovalle, which showcased its updated Infinito 2.0 range in hip vinyl-style disks. Several companies, like Mediterraneo by Bonotti brought yet more gigantic slabs of extremely authentic-looking imitation marble in colours just slightly too fantastic to be true!
At the other end of the spectrum, the rising trend of smaller decorative tiles picked up yet more steam at this year’s show, with brands like 42 zero 41, Quintessenza Ceramiche, WOW and Estudio Ceramica continuing to innovate in this product category. A particularly prevalent (but always welcome) sight at this year’s show was small format planks in earthy block colours – think algae green, burnt orange or ocean blue – often accented with a glossy crackled-effect finish. As we highlighted in our Cevisama review earlier this year, long and skinny tiles are clearly a popular choice in 2024, with the ultra-thin “matchstick” style also seeing some representation at the Italian exhibition.
Where the common sales pitch for large-format tiles references minimal grout lines and the creation of seamless spaces, these consciously artistic smaller pieces are often designed to deliberately draw attention in contexts like splashbacks and bars. Mosaic tiles also occupied their own relatively small niche at the show, with companies such as Materia showcasing their products in the form of impressive art pieces.
Splitting the difference between the enormous slabs and their miniature counterparts was a preponderance of patterned tiles, very often featuring softer, rounded designs such as circles and semi-circles, though sharper angular patterns appeared on many stands as well.
Tech talk
Cersaie 2024 also saw a notable increase in the amount of stand space companies dedicated to enumerating the technical qualities of their products. Clearly, as the realism of natural stone and wood effects on porcelain has reached a point of near parity with the genuine article, manufacturers have found it beneficial to focus on the areas where tiles can outperform the materials they’re modeled after.
One particularly impressive example of this trend was the Log and Log Cansei collections launched by Atlas Concorde, which were developed in collaboration with Itlas, a manufacturer of wood flooring, based on the now-protected Cansiglio Forest. According to Atlas: “LOG is an original collection, the first to offer a ceramic wood effect created through a synergistic partnership with natural wood experts. ITLAS selected the best exemplars of oak for Atlas Concorde, and the two companies studied their characteristics together: from the surface texture to the colors, from the reflections to the veining, not to mention the knots and other micro-details. This study of the details gave rise to extremely realistic surfaces, which bring out the details of the original material by naturally recreating the typical grain of oak.”
This collection is just one example of where the technical capabilities of ceramic tiles are not only beneficial in the commonly considered ways (durability, strength, suitability with underfloor heating, etc.) but also in their ability to recreate effects that might otherwise be unable to achieve in new projects. And while these collections are a particularly notable example, the focus on tiles as a continuously evolving technical product, despite their ancient origins, was a clear throughline at the 2024 edition of Cersaie.
The material qualities of the tiles are also, of course, of special interest to tile installers, who were once again enticed to this year’s show by a bevy of tool and ancillary manufacturers, along with the Tiling Town area hosted by Assoposa. This well-attended demonstration area remained abuzz with activity throughout the week, pulling in large crowds for its thorough training talks and practical showcases.
Here for good
Finally, exhibitors at Cersaie’s 41st outing placed, if possible, an even greater premium on sustainability and corporate social responsibility than in recent years. While Confindustria Ceramica does have its criticisms of the EU’s methods, manufacturers in the tiling industry clearly recognise the existential importance of sustainability to their long-term prospects. This was exemplified in the organisation’s Postcards for Sustainability campaign, launched last year, which highlighted the many ways that Italian companies in particular prioritise eco-friendly processes in their manufacturing, and which once again enjoyed strong promotion at this year’s show.
This impulse towards sustainability as a primary theme of the show reflects an industry that undeniably (and understandably) feels somewhat under threat. Whether that’s from an uncertain economic environment and regulatory burden which has seen production and volume sales decrease for tile manufacturers across Europe; whether it’s from international competition able to supply in huge quantities at far lower prices; or whether it’s from the looming threat of climate change, the tile sector – particularly in Europe – is justifiably concerned about its near- and long-term future.
And that’s why exhibitions such as Cersaie (and their continued success) are so important for the industry at large. It’s impossible to leave such an enormous, centralised display of creativity, innovation and technical know-how with anything other than optimism for the sector. Even despite the concerns over competition and dumping in Europe, and even with its strong message of Italian excellence, the show’s organisation and atmosphere celebrates the international nature of the tiling industry, with both exhibitors and visitors welcomed from across the globe.
Cersaie’s 41st edition was in many ways, back to business as usual – with no pandemic, no new supply chain disruptions and no anniversaries to celebrate. Fortunately, while business may be tough right now, tile manufacturers have proved themselves more than ready to meet the challenge with products that continue to push the boundaries of design, technology and sustainability.
Cersaie will return to the Bologna exhibition centre in 2025 from 22-26 September.
