China Ceramic Export Value Fell, Furniture Held — Two Halves of the Same Home Category

Customs data released on September 8 reads like two different industries. Same home category. Opposite directions.

Ceramic products: export volume 12.43 million tonnes, down 2.3%. Export value USD 10.45 billion, down 28%.

Furniture and parts: USD 44.43 billion, up 4.6%.

That gap in the first number is the story. Volume barely moved. The money that came back fell nearly thirty percent.

The second number deserves a caveat before anyone calls furniture the healthy half of the category. A 4.6% gain measured in dollars shrinks sharply once converted into RMB, because the currency moved against the dollar through the year. Thin growth in the reporting currency can be thinner still on the bank statement.

One category is repricing. The other is standing still.

The Usual Explanation Is Wrong

The reflex explanation for a 28% value drop is a price war. Some of that is real. It is not the driver.

The driver is policy.

On January 8, 2026, the Ministry of Finance and the State Taxation Administration issued Announcement No. 2 of 2026, cancelling VAT export rebates on photovoltaic products and a wider list — 249 items in total. Ceramics, glass, stone, gypsum and cement products were all on that list. For ceramics the effective date was April 1, 2026, and the rebate went to zero. Judgement is by the export date on the customs declaration, and there is no transition period.

The Rebate Was the Margin — Not a Line Item

That sentence needs context, because for a large part of the industry the rebate was not an incentive layered on top of a working business model. It was the business model.

The rate had already been cut once. It stood at 13% until December 1, 2024, when it was reduced to 9%. April 2026 took it to zero — a two-step exit across two years, not a sudden stop.

Industry operators have described the old arithmetic plainly. As the founder of one Foshan ceramics company put it: before December 2024 the state gave ceramic exports a 13-point rebate, and trading companies kept at least nine of those points. Many were not competing on product — they were collecting the rebate.

The published numbers support that. At 9%, the rebate was worth roughly RMB 3 per square metre of tile, against an export price that had already slid from about RMB 42/m² in 2023 to RMB 38/m². Industry research puts the rebate at 60–75% of the thin margin most ceramic exporters were running on.

When the subsidy stopped, the pricing power stopped with it.

Then Came the Timing

Shipments were pulled into the first quarter before the deadline. Building ceramics exports grew sharply through January and February as buyers front-loaded ahead of the cut. April brought the correction — a steep single-month fall in ceramic brick export value once the deadline passed.

That is not a demand collapse. It is a pull-forward followed by a hole.

Two other forces landed in the same quarter. The yuan strengthened through the year, shrinking the RMB value of every dollar invoice. And Middle East disruption pushed freight rates higher. Neither is a footnote when your product is heavy, low-value per kilogram, and shipped by the container.

The Part Most English Coverage Misses: Scope

Here is where the story usually stops short, and where it starts to matter for anyone buying from China rather than reading about it.

The cancellation was not limited to ceramic tiles.

• Chapter 69 — all of it: ceramic tiles and flagstones, mosaics and finishing ceramics, refractory ceramics, sanitary ware (WC pans, baths, wash basins), and ceramic tableware and kitchenware, plus decorative ceramics
• Chapter 70: glass blocks, safety glass, hollow glass, glass containers, glassware, glass kitchenware, optical glass and glass fibre products
• Chapter 68: processed marble, granite and slate, grinding wheels and abrasives, gypsum board, cement and concrete products, asbestos and mica articles

If you buy ceramic mugs, plates, bowls or kitchenware from China, this policy applies to your product line. So does the glassware version of it. The tile story and the tableware story are the same story.

That matters for how you read the next twelve months. This is not a building-materials problem sitting in someone else's category and leaving yours alone.

Inside Ceramics, the Split Is Sharper Than the Headline

Uniform decline is the wrong mental model. Inside the category, the lines are separating.

Low-value commodity tile is sliding. Large-format sintered slab — higher value per square metre, more surface treatment, more design content — is growing. Industry surveys this year found slab exporters reporting volume growth while tile exporters reported decline, with the value share of higher-specification product rising.

What separates the two is whether the product carries anything beyond price.

The Other Half: Tariffs, Not Rebates

Ceramics from China also face trade defence measures that predate this policy and will outlast it.

The European Union concluded its investigation into Chinese ceramic tableware and kitchenware in February 2026, setting anti-dumping duties far above the previous range. That lands on exactly the product line the rebate cancellation also touches — the same mugs, plates and bowls, hit twice from two directions.

In the United States, Chinese tile has faced anti-dumping duties for years at levels that effectively close the market to direct import.

So the 28% is not a single-cause number. The rebate cancellation is the largest and most recent driver. It is not the only one, and a reader who attributes the whole decline to policy will misjudge what happens next.

What It Means for Suppliers

The rebate era is over and it is not coming back. The lines that hold are the ones where price is not the only argument: finish consistency, colour control across repeat orders, delivery reliability, and a willingness to run smaller batches without a minimum that only makes sense at container scale.

Suppliers who spent a decade optimising for rebate-driven volume now have to optimise for something else. Some will not make the transition.

What It Means for Buyers

The near term looks good. Quotes are softer. Suppliers who would not previously move on price are more flexible now.

The medium-term risk is the mirror image. When an industry loses its margin cushion, the smallest factories exit first. The survivors have less patience for thin margins and long payment terms, and they concentrate capacity in the accounts that pay properly and forecast honestly.

Cheap today can mean thin capacity later.

The sensible response is not to squeeze the last point out of a quote. It is to lock in capacity with the suppliers who will still be in business in 2028 — and to make sure the quote you are comparing is actually comparable.

What I Watch in the Orders I Touch

1. Cost breakdowns split by material, labour, freight and duty — not one blended FOB number. A blended number hides where the movement is, and hides it from both sides.
2. Product mix shifting toward higher-value lines, the ones that held their value all year rather than the ones that competed on price alone.
3. Shorter quote validity, and payment terms matched to a supplier base with less room to absorb. A 90-day quote in this environment is a guess with a date on it.
4. Smaller, faster orders, so that a policy change or a freight spike lands on one shipment instead of a season's worth of inventory.

How This Lands on Our Own Ceramic and Glass Lines

This is not a subject we observe from a distance. Ceramic mugs, ceramic decor, glassware and kitchen storage are the categories we ship every week, and the rebate cancellation applies to all of them.

What that changes in practice:

• Quotes are broken out by cost component — body and glaze material, labour, packaging, freight, duty — so a buyer can see which line moved and why, instead of watching a blended number drift
• Shorter quote validity with a stated basis, so pricing stays honest when freight or exchange rates move
• Lower minimums on repeat colours and shapes — flexible MOQ is a genuine advantage now, because it lets a buyer test without committing a container to a line nobody has measured yet
• Colour and finish consistency across repeat orders — the quality that survives a market where price alone no longer wins the order

KJadeHome has been building ceramic and glass lines for international retailers since 2014, and the product lines that have held through this year are the ones where the specification carries the value. That is not a coincidence, and it is the only part of the market that is growing.

The More Useful Reading

The headline reads one category up, the other down. The more useful reading: one lost a subsidy and is repricing, and the other never had one to lose.

Numbers don't tell the whole story. They point at where the story is.