Production remains 11.7% below its pre-crisis average for 2014 to 2019, while overall manufacturing output stands 5.8% above its own. Chemical business confidence improved from -14.7 to -10.3 in the first eight months of 2026, helped by stronger assessments of recent production and lower inventories, but employment expectations deteriorated from -6.7 to -12.9, suggesting that producers remain cautious about hiring. Performance differs widely between countries: Spain grew by 2.8%, France was unchanged and Poland fell by only 0.2%, while output declined by 2.7% in Germany, 3.3% in Italy, 4.3% in Belgium and 5.0% in the Netherlands.

Upstream segments carry most of the weakness: production of other organic basic chemicals fell by 7.0%, polymers by 6.6% and crop protection products by 9.7%, while other chemicals grew by 3.6% and cosmetics by 1.4%. Trade also weakened. Exports fell by 4.2% to €127.6 billion and imports by 3.1% to €106.2 billion, narrowing the trade surplus from €23.6 billion to €21.4 billion. Lower exports to the United States, down by €6.3 billion, and to a lesser extent weaker sales of other organic basic chemicals drove the decline. The volume deficit narrowed from 7.1 to 3.0 million tonnes, but Cefic stresses that this reflects imports contracting faster than exports, mainly of basic inorganics, rather than stronger competitiveness.

Globally, chemical production grew by only 1.0% in the first seven months of 2026, after 3.8% in 2025, with growth concentrated in China, where output rose by 3.8%. Production declined in the EU (2.0%), the United States (2.1%), Germany (2.7%), Japan (3.8%), Brazil (3.1%) and Russia (2.6%), widening the gap between China and the traditional producing regions.

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