Eastern Europe shipped substantially higher volumes of PET in 2024, mainly on trade with Western Europe. Smaller volume exports of ABS also were up, Asia-Pacific trade accounting for the growth. Exports of SAN, Polyacetal, PC and PMMA contracted.

The region was the world’s largest importing region for ABS and SAN, and the second largest for PC and PMMA. Imports of all of the engineering polymers were up in 2024.

Nearly 90% of Eastern Europe’s exports of PET (bottle and other) of 821,000 tons went to Western Europe. Turkey and Lithuania accounted for most of the export total. Only about 25% of the 80,000 tons of ABS shipped went to Western Europe, the remainder, to Asia-Pacific. PC exports of 42,000 tons were down 10%, a small gain to Western Europe more than offset by declines to other regions.

Western Europe supplied 50% to 75% of the region’s imports of ABS, Polyacetal, PC and PMMA, 42% of SAN and 18% of PET-combined grades.

Asia-Pacific supplied over three-quarters of the region’s 1.4 million tons of PET imports. This was mainly polymer from China going to Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Uzbekistan and others. Asia-Pacific supplied 44% of the region’s ABS, 56% of SAN and roughly 30% of Polyacetal, PC and PMMA.

Eastern Europe imported higher volumes of ABS, PC, PMMA and PET from the Middle East, volumes ranging from 13,000 to 17,000 tons.

This series of blogs quantifies imports and exports in 2024 of the major engineering polymers – ABS, SAN, Polyacetal, PC, PMMA and PET – allowing comparisons across the polymers for the geographic regions of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa North America, Latin America, Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

From International Trader Publications’ continuously upgraded World Trade Analyses of all grades of engineering polymers.