U.S. Surface Imports: Anchored at the Top?
By Emerson Schwartzkopf
At mid-point, 2015 looks like one of the best years for dimensional-surface imports … but it’s anything but hot for product at the top of the pile.
Shipments of worked granite in January-June this year barely kept pace with the same time in 2014 Two major sources – Brazil and China – didn’t match last year’s totals, dragging down overall growth to less than 2%.
Granite’s slab-dragging pace contrasts with worked marble and quartz slabs. The 214,339 metric tons of marble arriving in U.S. ports-of-entry through the end of June is easily an all-time record, far surpassing the go-go years before the Great Recession. Quartz, meanwhile, continues its torrid annual growth of more than 50%, although the main contributor – China – isn’t going to play the closed-channel game of the industry’s major players.
Instead of writing at length about the numbers at mid-year, we’ll state the numbers themselves; the following charts show the 15 top exporters to the United States in each category. Most measure volume shipped in metric tons, except for quartz surfaces (which are tallied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in square meters, and converted by Stone Update into square feet) and slate (where dollar value offers the only consistent data)
One other note: “N/A” shows that a country didn’t appear in 2014 among the top 15 exporters to the United States in that particular category.
GRANITE
Worked granite – cut, one-side polished, ready for fabrication or installation – is the largest category, with an import growth rate in the early- and mid-2000s that drove the U.S. dimensional trade. The shipments started to decline in 2007 and tanked at decade’s end.
Mid-2015 showed a continued revival, with 883,508 metric tons arriving in the United States. However, that’s only 1.8% better than mid-2014. Of granite’s Big Three, two – Brazil and China – fell behind last year’s pace; to be fair, China did manage to pick up year-to-year growth in 2015’s second quarter.
The 2015 overall granite total represent a long, and successful, journey back from the bottom of 502,871 metric tons in mid-year 2009. The all-time January-June record came in 2006 with 1,206,957 metric tons.
| U.S. Worked Granite Imports | ||||
| (metric tons) | ||||
| Q1 2015 | Q2 2015 | First Half 2015 | Change H1 2014 | |
| Brazil | 168,094 | 249,765 | 417,859 | -9.7% |
| China | 86,861 | 131,022 | 217,883 | -4.5% |
| India | 62,531 | 81,882 | 144,413 | 38.9% |
| Italy | 15,063 | 18,880 | 33,943 | -5.1% |
| Canada | 4,380 | 24,694 | 29,074 | 50.9% |
| Spain | 7,458 | 13,297 | 20,755 | 5.2% |
| Taiwan | 5,544 | 1,396 | 6,940 | 39.7% |
| Saudi Arabia | 585 | 1,181 | 1,766 | -32.9% |
| South Africa | 470 | 848 | 1,318 | -20.7% |
| Portugal | 385 | 361 | 746 | N/A |
| Argentina | 89 | 204 | 293 | -62.9% |
| Hong Kong | 49 | 171 | 220 | 27.9% |
| Korea | 90 | 95 | 185 | 77.9% |
| Indonesia | 25 | 138 | 163 | N/A |
| France | 21 | 88 | 109 | -4.4% |
| All Others | 7,215 | 626 | 7,841 | 343.2% |
| Total | 358,860 | 524,648 | 883,508 | 1.1% |
| Source: USITC; Stone Update analysis | ||||
MARBLE
All those trendy articles and blogs about marble’s new popularity seem to bear out the tremendous rise in U.S. worked-marble imports, as the 214,339 metric tons registered in 2015’s first half whips 2014’s by 58.6%. This year’s shipments also blow away the previous first-half record of 142,038 metric tons, set in 2007.
Are this year’s numbers too good to last? Much of the major growth recently comes from Turkey, which moved from a second-tier supplier in 2012 to today’s leading U.S. marble source. Its recent growth pace, including a second-quarter year-to-year rocket rate of 292.3%, will be hard to match through the rest of this year.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
QUARTZ SURFACES
Like worked marble, quartz-surfaces imports kept at a torrid speed in this year’s first half, setting yet another record with 30.1 million ft² arriving in the United States. At a pace that’s 51.2% ahead of 2014, is there any need to be worried.
Worried, no. Concerned … oh yeah, even if you’re a fabricator that’s sworn to give the eternal evil eye to the product. Some of the ill-feeling about quartz surfaces among the natural-stone crowd came from overaggressive claims and dubious science (The “R” Word), but the product’s manufacturers held varying degrees of tight control on branding, distribution and use.
Take a look at first-half 2015 totals, and there are two countries synonymous with product channel guidance (Israel and Spain) supplying 12.3 million ft² of quartz surfaces and growth rates from 2014 of 14% or so for each. Now, add the three largest supplier countries with 2015 half-year growth rates of greater than 100% — China, Vietnam and India – and they control 12 million ft² of imports without dealing with a lot of branding, captive shops and territories.
In other words, quartz isn’t only at the home center and designer studio across the city. It’s arriving at the fabricator down the street, and more is on the way.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
TRAVERTINE
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
OTHER CALCAREOUS
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
OTHER STONE
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
SLATE
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Get the news of the industry with Slab & Sheet, the weekly e-newsletter every Thursday from Stone Update. Sign up for free delivery here.
For the latest industry info, check Stone Update on Twitter and Facebook.
