U.S. Stone Imports 2008: Crash Diet

As granite drove the decade-plus growth in imports until last year, the stone also contributed the most to import declines last year. For worked granite – the cut-and-polished slabs and tiles – import value dropped by 19.2 percent to $1.21 billion. Volume also declined in 2008, with the 1.71 million metric tons of worked granite representing a 9.9-percent drop from the previous year.

There’s more on overall granite imports little later on, but a closer look at some of the quarterly figures show how 2008 became a, well, unpredictable year for determining import trends.

Take last year’s fourth quarter, which started with the worldwide stock-price meltdown and a virtual halt of the credit market for personal and business finance. With stone demand already disappearing with a slow economy earlier in 2008, it follows that shipments would drop dramatically as the year came to a close.

And, the Big Four in granite – Brazil, China, Italy and India – had a worse 2008 fourth quarter in worked-granite tonnage heading to the United States compared with the last three months of 2007. However, for Brazil, the fourth-quarter decline wasn’t as deep as the rest of the year.

In other words, while 2008 was lousy, the last three months saw an uptick in the amount of Brazilian granite hitting U.S. ports. How’d they do that?

It’s simple: Brazilian exporters lowered the price. While the annual average value-per-metric-ton for worked Brazilian granite came to $859.84 last year, the fourth-quarter value averaged $548.42 per metric ton.

In fact, the rest of the major granite exporters showed some fourth-quarter value erosion. None, however, matched the astonishing difference of India; the average per-metric-ton value for Indian worked granite came to $429.79 for all of 2008, but only $180.63 for the fourth quarter.

The import data for the first three months of 2009 show that the great shipment and value spree at the end of last year didn’t continue past New Year’s Day. Average values per-metric-ton for worked granite, for example, are all more than $700 for the major importing countries, and the total tonnage for granite slabs and tiles is barely half of first quarter 2008.

Through a number of circumstances – last year’s increase in dollar strength, shipments arranged before Wall Street took a swan dive, and exporters eager to unload shipments from their docks to U.S.-bound ships – more stone arrived than anyone really needed. It’s not news to plenty of fabricators and distributors looking out at their stoneyards, but there’s a current surplus of dimensional stone.