2025 EVA Resin: Global Market Size of 30.9 Billion

Ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA), as a highly distinctive high-end polyolefin material, has played an important role in areas such as foam shoe materials, hot melt adhesives, and agricultural films for a long time due to its excellent softness, elasticity, transparency, low-temperature resistance, and processing performance.

However, in the past decade, with the advancement of the global energy transition, the fate of EVA has been completely rewritten. Due to its excellent light transmission, lamination performance, and aging resistance, EVA has become the core material for encapsulation films in photovoltaic modules, accounting for over 90% of the cost of these films, and is hailed as the "invisible champion of the photovoltaic industry chain." This role transformation has not only significantly raised the ceiling for EVA demand but has also turned it into a strategic high ground that major countries’ chemical industries are competing for.

In 2025, the global ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) industry is in a critical period of structural adjustment. As the world's largest producer and consumer of EVA, China's market dynamics profoundly impact the global supply and demand landscape. Despite rapid capacity expansion domestically, the industry is facing severe challenges of "high supply and weak demand," with prices continuing to decline and market competition intensifying.

Overall, the global EVA industry exhibits a significant oligopolistic characteristic, with the top five companies collectively controlling over 60% of the market supply. High capital investment and technical barriers have formed a strong industry moat. From the perspective of the competitive landscape of leading companies, international giants and Chinese local enterprises have formed differentiated competition paths.

International giants occupy the high-end market with technological advantages. As a global leader in the EVA industry, ExxonMobil reached a production capacity of 1.5 million tons in 2023, with a global market share of about 22%. Its production bases are spread across North America and Europe, and its product line covers a full range of VA content grades, including high, medium, and low. Particularly in the field of medical-grade products with more than 40% VA content, it holds a technological monopoly advantage. The company plans to increase the capacity of bio-based EVA to 20% of its total output by 2026. Companies such as Dow Chemical and BASF focus on the development of specialty EVA, maintaining a premium capability in environmentally friendly and high-performance products. BASF and Mitsui Chemicals hold over 70% of the market share in China's high-end catalyst market, forming a monopoly on upstream core technologies. South Korean companies LG Chem and Lotte Chemical, leveraging cost advantages and proximity to regional markets, engage in direct competition with Chinese companies in the fields of foam-grade and photovoltaic-grade EVA. Lotte Chemical, with a production capacity of 500,000 tons per year, primarily employs solution processes to produce high-end foaming materials, holding about 7% of the global market share.

Chinese domestic enterprises are characterized by capacity expansion and dominance in the mid-to-low-end market. As a leading EVA producer in China, Sinopec Group has an annual production capacity of 1.2 million tons, accounting for approximately 18% of the global market share. Its production capacity is concentrated in regions with high downstream demand such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. The company leverages its advantages in industrial chain integration to ensure the supply of mainstream products like photovoltaic materials and shoe materials. Private enterprises such as Lianhong New Materials Technology and Sibur Chemical have overcome technical bottlenecks through independent research and development. Lianhong New Materials Technology has increased the capacity utilization rate of its high-pressure autoclave process to over 85%, raising its domestic market share to 15% and securing a niche market advantage with its rapid response capability to the photovoltaic industry's demand. Since 2025, the launch of new domestic production capacity has accelerated. Besides Lianhong New Materials Technology's plan to commission over 200,000 tons of new capacity in the fourth quarter, large projects such as Zhejiang Petrochemical's 700,000-ton LDPE-EVA unit are also entering the implementation stage, continuously enhancing China's weight in the global capacity landscape.

The development of China's EVA industry is a typical industrial epic of "introduction, digestion, absorption, and re-innovation," but the process is full of challenges.

High dependency on imports period (before 2020): Before the explosion of the photovoltaic industry, China's EVA production capacity was limited, and the self-sufficiency rate remained below 40% for a long time, with almost all high-end photovoltaic materials relying on imports from regions such as South Korea and Taiwan.

Capacity Investment Boom Period (2021-2024): With the establishment of the "Dual Carbon" goals, the photovoltaic industry is entering a super cycle, and EVA prices once surged to over 30,000 yuan/ton. The huge profit margins have stimulated a frenzy of capital influx, sparking a wave of EVA project constructions in China. Companies such as Shenghong Group's Sierbang, Lianhong New Science, Zhejiang Petrochemical, Gulei Petrochemical, and Zhongke (Guangdong) Refining & Chemical have become the main forces in capacity expansion.

Supply and Demand Pattern Reversal Period (2025): With the concentrated release of new production capacity, China's EVA capacity is rapidly increasing. By 2025, the total domestic capacity has surpassed 5 million tons per year. However, the consumption in 2025 is expected to be only 3.6 million tons. Downstream demand shows a pattern of "photovoltaic dominance, traditional weakness."

In the photovoltaic sector, which accounts for over 35% of the total EVA consumption, the supply of photovoltaic materials is expected to reach approximately 140,000 tons in October 2025, while the demand is only 130,000 tons, marking a situation of oversupply for the first time. The main reason for this is the decline in the production of photovoltaic modules. From January to August, the cumulative export value of domestic photovoltaic modules was $15.881 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 24.06%, leading downstream film companies to be cautious in their procurement, primarily focusing on digesting inventory.

The demand in traditional sectors is showing a differentiated trend. The hot melt adhesive sector is benefiting from the development of e-commerce and cold chain logistics, maintaining a growth rate of 8%-10%. In 2023, the global packaging EVA market size is $2.5 billion, with China contributing 40% of the share, although high-end hot melt adhesive EVA still relies on imports. Traditional sectors such as foam shoe materials and cables are affected by macroeconomic factors, with expectations for the "Golden September and Silver October" peak season in 2025 falling short. Insufficient orders have led to a significant decline in soft material prices, becoming a major driver of the overall weak downward trend in the EVA market in October.

Industrial Structure Challenges: Low-end Involution and High-end Insufficiency

Despite China's EVA production capacity being among the world's leading, there is a prominent structural contradiction in the product mix, with an oversupply of mid-to-low-end products and an insufficient supply of high-end products. In October, the decline in mid-to-low-end products such as soft materials and hard materials exceeded that of photovoltaic materials, while prices for high-end medical-grade and environmentally-friendly products remained stable, and the reliance on imports remains high.

Homogeneous competition is severe.Most of the newly commissioned units adopt the tubular process, with their product structure inclined towards general grades like foam materials and cable materials. When these capacities are released in concentration, it inevitably leads to a "price war" in the mid to low-end market, which is also the core reason why the price drop of soft materials in October far exceeded that of hard materials.

High-end products still need breakthroughs: In the areas of top-grade photovoltaic materials (especially top-grade materials suitable for N-type modules) and high-end hot melt adhesive materials with high VA content, domestically only...Sirbon, Lianhong XinkeUntil a few leading enterprises can achieve stable mass supply, the overall quality still lags behind imported products, and some top-level demands still need to be met by imports. The autoclave process, which has the highest technical barriers, still has a long way to go for domestic application.

The global EVA market is undergoing a period of structural transformation characterized by "capacity expansion in Asia and high-end leadership in Europe and the United States." China has become a key variable in the global market due to its scale advantage in production capacity, but there remains a gap with international giants in terms of technological advancement and product differentiation. From the current state of development, China's EVA industry has achieved a breakthrough in "quantity," with production capacity, output, and consumption all ranking first globally. The localization of core equipment has broken foreign monopolies, and mainstream products like photovoltaic materials are now self-sufficient. However, there is still a long way to go in improving "quality." The reliance on imports for high-end catalysts and specialty products is high, and there are significant structural imbalances between supply and demand.