Africa’s only sizable exports of engineering polymers are PET.

The region’s imports of PET are much larger. The region also imports small volumes of ABS, SAN, Polyacetal, PC and PMMA.

Nearly all of Africa’s PET exports were polymer from Egypt shipped to Western and Eastern Europe.

Africa imported 1.5 million tons of bottle-grade PET plus 361,000 tons of film/fiber grade, 90% or more of which came from Asia-Pacific, mainly China. Top volume and growth markets for bottle-grade polymer were Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria and Tanzania. Nigeria and Ghana were top growth markets for film/fiber grade

Asia-Pacific was also the region’s top supplier of ABS, SAN and PC. Western Europe was a significant source for PC; the Middle East for ABS, PC and PET.

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 updated World Trade Analyses of all grades of engineering polymers.