Europe bought 295,956 tonnes of ethyl acetate from outside the bloc in the twelve months to August 2026, 5.1% less than a year earlier, and paid EUR 230.8 million for it — 11.7% less. The average import unit value fell to EUR 780 per tonne, the lowest twelve-month average since April 2021, but the monthly series turned in March 2026 at EUR 695 and has risen 17.9% since, to EUR 820 in August. Under that flat, cheap surface the supply map has been redrawn: China doubled its volume to 67,909 tonnes and now holds 22.9% of the book, Saudi Arabia lost two-thirds of its business, and the United Kingdom — still the largest single external supplier at 86,121 tonnes — mothballed the plant that made the material. INEOS idled its Hull acetyls complex, including 200,000 tonnes a year of ethyl acetate capacity, in September 2026.
Data updated: 2026-10-26
Latest 12 months: cheap tonnes, and a price that turned in March
The table covers HS 291531, EU27 trade with partners outside the EU, September 2025 to August 2026. It is the newest window in Eurostat Comext, refreshed on 16 October 2026. Values are declared customs values, so unit values include freight and insurance on the import side and average over grades and packaging inside each month.
| Month | Imports (t) | Import unit value (EUR/t) | Exports (t) | Export unit value (EUR/t) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09 | 21,675 | 750 | 1,222 | 1,031 |
| 2025-10 | 31,315 | 728 | 1,400 | 1,001 |
| 2025-11 | 18,644 | 739 | 448 | 1,438 |
| 2025-12 | 24,110 | 723 | 166 | 2,493 |
| 2026-01 | 18,120 | 751 | 882 | 1,173 |
| 2026-02 | 29,781 | 696 | 736 | 1,099 |
| 2026-03 | 22,878 | 695 | 654 | 1,951 |
| 2026-04 | 23,254 | 803 | 368 | 2,308 |
| 2026-05 | 28,634 | 890 | 322 | 1,938 |
| 2026-06 | 31,304 | 858 | 376 | 2,169 |
| 2026-07 | 28,568 | 869 | 934 | 1,090 |
| 2026-08 | 17,675 | 820 | 832 | 1,228 |
Three features matter. First, volume has no trend: monthly arrivals stayed between 17,675 and 31,315 tonnes, with no seasonal shape to speak of. Second, the price path is a shallow V. Import unit values slid from EUR 750 in September 2025 to EUR 695 in March 2026 — the lowest monthly reading since October 2020 — then climbed to EUR 890 by May and has held above EUR 800 since, closing the window at EUR 820. Third, the EU barely exports the molecule: 8,338 tonnes in twelve months, 2.8% of the import volume, at EUR 1,339 per tonne.
August is the newest month and, like any newest month in a customs dataset, will be revised. Its 17,675 tonnes is the low point of the window and should not be read as a demand signal on its own. Monthly export unit values are noisier still: December 2025 cleared 166 tonnes at EUR 2,493 per tonne, which is a drummed specialty parcel, not a market price.
The money fell twice as fast as the volume
A 5.1% fall in tonnage against an 11.7% fall in value is the arithmetic of price, not of demand. European buyers took 15,832 fewer tonnes than in the previous twelve months and paid EUR 30.7 million less for them. Read the other way: the same tonne cost 7.0% less at the border than a year earlier, and 45.3% less than in 2022, when the annual average peaked at EUR 1,426 per tonne.
That matters for anyone still holding 2025 contracts. The 2025 calendar-year average was EUR 804 per tonne; the latest twelve months cleared at EUR 780, and the last four months of the window averaged EUR 860. A price clause that references a calendar-year average is now roughly one quarter behind the market.
Where the tonnes come from
Six origins supply 97.9% of the import book, and their order has changed. The United Kingdom remains the largest at 29.1% but lost 23.0% of its volume; Mexico is second at a discount; China is third and doubled; India is the only other origin above 5% and grew 37.3%.
| Origin | Volume (t) | Share of volume | Unit value (EUR/t) | Volume vs prior 12m |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 86,121 | 29.1% | 773 | −23.0% |
| Mexico | 79,220 | 26.8% | 639 | −7.2% |
| China | 67,909 | 22.9% | 844 | +107.7% |
| India | 27,354 | 9.2% | 872 | +37.3% |
| South Africa | 18,462 | 6.2% | 896 | +3.8% |
| Saudi Arabia | 10,584 | 3.6% | 736 | −67.5% |
| All other origins | 6,306 | 2.1% | 1,282 | −45.4% |
Two readings matter. The cheapest origin is not the largest, and the fastest-growing origin is not the cheapest: Chinese parcels cleared at EUR 844 per tonne, 8.2% above the all-origin average of EUR 780, while Mexican parcels cleared at EUR 639, 18.1% below it. Volume shares alone would hide that spread, which is why the unit-value column belongs next to the share column.
The Gulf lane has effectively closed. Saudi Arabia shipped 32,616 tonnes in the previous twelve months and 10,584 in the latest, and its own filings point the same way: world exports of HS 291531 fell to 34,135 tonnes in 2025 from 75,305 tonnes in 2024, so Europe is not being singled out — the supply is gone. China’s move is the mirror image. Chinese exports to the world rose from 515,931 tonnes in 2024 to 719,101 in 2025, and EU arrivals from China ran from 1,785 tonnes in September 2025 to 12,781 in June 2026 before easing to 3,925 in August. The UK’s own filings agree with Europe’s mirror data on direction: British exports of HS 291531 were worth USD 103.9 million in 2025 against USD 152.5 million in 2024, a fall of 31.9%, although the UK reports no net mass for this code.
Inside the bloc the picture is quieter but not static. Intra-EU27 dispatches in the same window were 204,641 tonnes, 17.2% below a year earlier, with Belgium alone supplying 136,124 tonnes at EUR 998 per tonne — 27.9% above the extra-EU average. The internal price is not the import price, and internal volumes were already shrinking before Hull went quiet.
Seven years, and an export book that disappeared
Annual data put the window in context. Imports have drifted from 347,771 tonnes in 2019 to 308,335 in 2025; exports have collapsed from 26,913 to 10,076 over the same period, and the export unit value is still 20.2% below its 2022 level.
| Year | Imports (t) | Import unit value (EUR/t) | Exports (t) | Export unit value (EUR/t) | Net balance (t) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 347,771 | 820 | 26,913 | 1,040 | −320,858 |
| 2020 | 354,287 | 714 | 22,990 | 887 | −331,296 |
| 2021 | 349,706 | 1,129 | 14,853 | 1,381 | −334,853 |
| 2022 | 332,601 | 1,426 | 17,425 | 1,553 | −315,176 |
| 2023 | 310,996 | 1,016 | 17,325 | 1,115 | −293,670 |
| 2024 | 325,416 | 889 | 13,104 | 1,218 | −312,312 |
| 2025 | 308,335 | 804 | 10,076 | 1,240 | −298,259 |
The deficit has never fallen below 293,670 tonnes in a calendar year since 2019. The latest twelve months narrow it to 287,618 tonnes from 299,442, but not because Europe sold more: exports fell 32.5% while imports fell 5.1%, and the narrowing is simply imports shrinking faster than exports. A market of roughly 300,000 tonnes a year supplied from outside, against 8,000 tonnes of outbound trade, is not a two-way market. It is a buyers’ market that has just lost its largest domestic supplier.
Analysis: the Hull idling removes more capacity than the UK ships
Analysis. On 22 September 2026 INEOS said it was idling all three of its Hull acetyls plants, which the company describes as Europe’s last world-scale acetyls units, citing gas prices 12 times US levels and eight times those of coal-based Chinese production. INEOS lists the site at 500,000 tonnes a year of acetic acid, 150,000 of acetic anhydride and 200,000 of ethyl acetate; two of the three units had already stopped when the statement was published and the third was due off within days. A year earlier the same business had cut 60 jobs at Hull and publicly called on the UK government and the European Commission to impose anti-dumping duties on Chinese and US acetyls imports.
That closure lands directly on the table above. The United Kingdom supplied 86,121 tonnes, 29.1% of EU27 extra-EU imports, in the twelve months to August 2026, and Hull’s 200,000-tonne ethyl acetate nameplate is 2.3 times that flow. The gap is accounted for by UK domestic demand and non-EU destinations, but the point stands: the largest single external origin in the EU27 import mix has just lost its production base, and the tonnes it used to ship will have to be replaced. Note the timing too. The EU import price turned up in April 2026, five months before the announcement, so the rebound cannot be attributed to Hull; the closure is the reason to expect the rebound to hold rather than fade.
The wider context is not subtle. Cefic’s closures radar, published in January 2026, counted 37 million tonnes of European chemical capacity shut since 2022 — about 9% of the total — with 20,000 direct jobs lost, while announced new investment capacity fell from 2.7 million tonnes in 2022 to 0.3 million tonnes in 2025. Acetyls are now part of that count.
Analysis: who fills the gap, and at what price
Outlook. Three lanes can absorb the UK’s 86,121 tonnes, and none of them is comfortable. China has the volume — 719,101 tonnes of exports in 2025 — and has already taken share, but its parcels clear 8.2% above the EU average, so it is not a discount source at the border. India grew 37.3% to 27,354 tonnes at EUR 872 per tonne, the second-highest unit value among the large origins, which suggests specialty and pharma grades rather than commodity replacement. The United States, the obvious gas-cost winner, shipped 15.3 thousand tonnes to the world in 2025 and 114 tonnes to the EU27 in twelve months: the capacity is there, the trade lane is not.
Which leaves Mexico, the second-largest origin at 79,220 tonnes and the cheapest at EUR 639 per tonne. It is also the one number in this article that does not reconcile. Mexico’s own customs filings report 21,766 tonnes of world exports of HS 291531 in 2025 — 57,454 tonnes less than the EU recorded as Mexican origin in a twelve-month window that overlaps it. Either the goods are re-exported through Mexico, or the origin declaration is being used loosely, or Mexico’s export statistics are incomplete. Until a buyer can match a bill of lading to a Mexican plant, that lane should be treated as a price signal, not a qualified source.
The price implication is one-directional in the short run. The March 2026 floor of EUR 695 per tonne was set while the UK origin was still shipping between 2,070 and 10,313 tonnes a month. From the fourth quarter of 2026 that origin is structural rather than marginal, and replacement tonnes have to clear at EUR 844 (China), EUR 872 (India) or EUR 639 (Mexico, unverified). A return to the first-quarter level would now need a demand collapse rather than a supply recovery.
What to do with this before the next tender
Index to the declared series, not to an assessment. The monthly import unit value above is public, reproducible and refreshed every month, which makes it defensible in a contract formula and impossible for a price reporting agency to restate.
Treat EUR 695 per tonne as the floor of the last cycle, not as a benchmark. It was struck in March, before the supply event, and the four months since have averaged EUR 850.
Qualify a second origin in 2026, not 2027. Specification approval for a new ethyl acetate source takes months, and the UK lane that supplied 29.1% of the book is now the least secure in the mix.
Separate the intra-EU price from the import price. Belgian dispatches at EUR 998 per tonne are 27.9% above extra-EU parity; if your transfer price tracks the intra-EU average, you are paying a premium for security of supply that has just become less secure.
The upstream molecule is covered separately: acetic acid import and export data for the feedstock, n-butanol market analysis for the sister ester, and acetone and isopropanol for the solvents that compete with it in coatings and inks.
Data limitations
Customs record only what crosses a border. Ethyl acetate consumed where it is produced never appears, and the intra-EU27 rows measure dispatches between member states, which may be production, storage or trading positions rather than output.
HS 291531 does not distinguish grade. Technical, urethane-grade and pharma-grade material, bulk and drummed, all pass through one code, and a single large specialty parcel moves a monthly average; this is why the December 2025 export unit value should be ignored.
The Mexican origin figure does not reconcile with Mexico’s own export filings, as set out above; the same caution applies to the other small origins, where monthly volumes are too thin for a unit value to mean anything.
August 2026 is provisional and will be revised. The United Kingdom files export value but no net mass for this code, so its unit value cannot be computed from its own statistics and the UK figures here come from Eurostat’s mirror data. No subscription price assessment was used, no series was interpolated and no figure in this article was estimated.
Data sources
- Eurostat Comext, DS-045409 (EU trade since 1988 by HS2-4-6 and CN8), EU27 extra-EU monthly and annual trade in HS 291531, extracted 26 October 2026, dataset updated 16 October 2026 — https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/DS-045409/default/table (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Eurostat Comext API, DS-045409 monthly query, EU27 imports from EXT_EU27_2020, 2019-01 to 2026-08 — monthly imports query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Eurostat Comext API, DS-045409 monthly query, EU27 exports to EXT_EU27_2020, 2019-01 to 2026-08 — monthly exports query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Eurostat Comext API, DS-045409 annual query, EU27 extra-EU trade in HS 291531, 2020 to 2025 — annual query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Eurostat Comext API, DS-045409 monthly partner breakdown, EU27 imports of HS 291531 by origin, 2024-09 to 2026-08 — partner query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- UN Comtrade public preview API, annual HS 291531 exports: China (156) 2024 and 2025, Saudi Arabia (682) 2024 and 2025, United States (842) 2025, Mexico (484) 2025, India (699) 2024 — China 2025 exports query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- UN Comtrade public preview API, annual HS 291531 exports of the United Kingdom (826), 2024 and 2025 — UK 2025 exports query (accessed 2026-10-26)
- INEOS, “INEOS Idles Europe’s last world-scale Acetyls plant as Energy prices hit 12 times US level”, 22 September 2026 — INEOS news release (accessed 2026-10-26)
- INEOS, “INEOS cuts 60 jobs in Hull as UK energy costs and dumped Chinese imports cripple industry”, 7 October 2025 — INEOS news release (accessed 2026-10-26)
- INEOS, Hull site capacity data (acetic acid 500 kt, acetic anhydride 150 kt, ethyl acetate 200 kt) — INEOS Hull site page (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Cefic, “Chemical plant closures rate surges six-fold in Europe since 2022, new report finds”, 28 January 2026 — Cefic news release (accessed 2026-10-26)
- Chemistry World, “Ineos temporarily closes UK acetyls plants”, 25 September 2026 — Chemistry World (accessed 2026-10-26)
If you need the full monthly matrix behind these tables — every origin by month, with volumes, values and unit values, plus the same cut for acetic acid and the other acetyls — you can request a sample or a custom cut.