EDITORIAL Another magazine?

Another magazine?

In an interview with the Italian daily newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera”, Madhav Chinnappa, Director of News Ecosystem Development at Google, recently said there is “something profound and visceral about the experience of physical reading. Daily newspapers will have to evolve and focus on their distinctive value. Some will change their publication intervals: but I don’t think they’ll become extinct.” 

We can only agree with him, because we’ve been committed to providing quality content for the coverings and finishings community for over 20 years.

We’ve built an information ecosystem that origi-

nates with our printed magazines and extends to

the web, direct marketing and social media, because reliable information is a valuable commodity, perhaps now more than ever before. Madhav Chinnappa would seem to agree: “People who search for news [on Google, ed.] hardly ever see anything reliable.”

That’s why, over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to build a new cross-media product called “Surfaces International”. This new magazine, published in both printed and electronic format, embraces a full range of architectural materials, and therefore shows the flip-side of the world of coverings that we’ve traditionally focused on, thus completing and complementing it. This is also why we’ve decided to pair it up with Tile International. By simply rotating the magazine

through 180°, readers of the print edition can read the new content, and gain a whole new magazine with a simple physical act.

Gian Paolo Crasta g.crasta@tiledizioni.it

As always in Issue 2 of Tile International, the pages that follow bring you the latest news on the two main covering products: ceramic and parquet. As you can imagine, both segments have suffered setbacks this year, and what might happen over the months to come has never been harder to predict. For example, Cresme, an Italian economic research organisation specialising in the construction industry, is forecasting a worldwide downturn of 4%

in construction investment for 2020, accompanied by downturns in the ceramic and parquet sec-

tors. World tile production fell by 3.7% in 2019 and a further downturn (of 8.5%) is expected this year. The European Parquet Federation (FEP), meanwhile, is forecasting a fall in production and consumption across Europe for the current year, despite the modestly positive results achieved in 2019, namely +1.2% for consumption and +1.6% for production.

The forecasts of Rak Ceramics and Victoria plc Group, the two ceramic groups we interviewed, remain positive, however, and point to the continued vitality of the ceramic industry, its entrepreneurial spirit and its conUPSIDEDOWN ! stant capacity for innovation and aggregation, to create ever larger global players. A few hours before going to print, we also received news of ABK Group’s acquisi-

tion of Gardenia Orchi-

dea – another promising development against an otherwise less-than-rosy backdrop. ✕

For SAFE AND ProTECTED SPACES