As the Italians prepare for the opening of the 46th annual Marmomacc stone exhibition in Verona, being held from 21 to 24 September, Internazionale Marmi e Macchine Carrara reported plenty of encouraging signs of improved trade in their report on the latest figures issued by Istat (the Italian national statistics centre) covering the first five months of 2011.

In raw figures, Italy exported 1,654,000 tonnes of marble, granite, travertine and other stones, up 1.6% on last year. But that relatively modest increase in volume produced k645.5million income, which is an increase of 10.4%.

The figures might look encouraging for Italy but they represent a continuing increase in exports of raw materials to China, who are processing it to sell to the world in competition with finished products from Italy. In Marble, Italy’s biggest stone export, those blocks showed an improved return, with the increase in value (19%) being more than three times greater than the increase in volume (5.9%). The average price per tonne of Marble blocks and slabs exported from Italy is now k218, much the same as granite.

As Italy sells more block to China, the volume of finished marble product it sells to the rest of the world is falling – the latest figures show a decrease of 10.2%. But they are adding value to those products all the time and the income from finished marble product exports was up 6.3%, making the average value of finished marble products now k839 per tonne (compared with the average value of exported finished granite product of k862 per tonne).

With granite block, the Italians did not manage to improve the price of their exports. The quantity of block exports increased by almost twice as much as the price (10.1% compared with 5.1%).

But, again, Italy managed to increase the added value of finished products in granite with income increasing 12.1% against an increase in volume of 8%.

The areas where Italy is successfully increasing its exports are the same as they have been for the past few years. In Europe, markets showing a positive trend were Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France with, more recently, Poland and Russia also showing growth.

The UK, the Netherlands and Spain were not so good. The US is an important market for Italy and exports there grew 4% by value and 0.7% by volume.