With the real estate and new construction crisis, aggregates and concrete professionals are preparing for a year 2024 “which pushes all historical lows downward” in France, after an already difficult year 2023.
All the indicators are red for 2024, declared to AFP Alain Plantier, president of the National Union of Quarrying and Construction Materials Industries (Unicem) on the sidelines of the presentation of the sector’s activity report in 2023 on Thursday.
For 2023, the production of ready-mixed concrete should have fallen by 6.5% in France compared to that of 2022, 36.7 million m3, according to estimates from Unicem which also expects a decline of 7.5 % of aggregate production, 320million tonnes next year.
The economic situation has deteriorated much more than announced at the end of 2022, especially in new construction and individual homes (…) where we have seen sales collapsing, building permits collapsing and updates also under construction, summarized Carole Deneuve, head of the economic department at Unicem.
In October, the morale of French real estate developers had never been so low since 1991, when the first quarterly surveys on construction start prospects carried out by INSEE were launched, she added.
According to the Real Estate Developers Observatory, sales of new homes fell by 48.6% in the third quarter, unprecedented since the observatory existed.
As a result, the materials follow the trend, adds Mr. Plantier. As we respond to needs, by extracting materials from quarries, we are not going to store raw materials for pleasure, he explains.
Unicem represents 2,400 companies on some 6,000 sites, mainly aggregate quarries or ready-mixed concrete stations, as well as stone specialists, who represent some 77% of the turnover of construction materials in France. .