U.S. Stone Imports 2011: A Little Bit Better
TRAVERTINE
There’s one U.S. stone sector – travertine – almost wholly dependent one country: Turkey. In 2011, Turkey fed more travertine into exports, further improving travertine’s position.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The surprise may be that Turkey’s 12.8% gain in travertine import values didn’t translate into a double-digit rise for overall travertine-import valuation. In what seems to be a price battle, China and Peru lost out with drops in import values; so does Italy, but it’s not for cutting valuations at the dock.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
China and Peru clearly put the premium on volume, cutting valuation while increasing tonnage. Italy – never a place to slash prices to gain market share – shipped far less. And Turkey dominated the market to the point that the overall rise in volume came with two-tenths of its own growth rate.
Last year still ranked far below the all-time volume record of 962,491 metric tons, set in 2006. But 2011’s travertine total also remains almost double the amount imported in 2000.
OTHER CALCAREOUS
The end of 2011 finally allows the wrap-up of the importing country that ran away – Lebanon – and how it thoroughly jumbled the market for other calcareous. It also shows how another country managed to skew this year’s totals.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For a few years, Lebanon dominated U.S. imports of other calcareous in the same way Turkey leads the imported travertine market. Then, after May 2010, Lebanon quit exporting to the United States, and nobody else picked up the slack. Lebanese exports of other calcareous were valued at level so low it bordered on the ridiculous – down to one-fifth of the average from all other countries – so the pullout didn’t make much of a dent in 2010. (The 1.8% decline in 2011 comes mainly from a slowdown in higher-priced Italian exports.)
Lebanon’s abandonment of the U.S. market accounts for a large part of the massive decline in other calcareous tonnage for 2011:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Once again, this stone sector is a mess, although it’s not Lebanon’s fault last year. The numbers would be worse, save for a massive infusion of Mexican stone into U.S. ports-of-entry. The country went from 347 metric tons in January to 9,814 in February; through July, Mexico’s shipments of other calcareous shot to 35,875 metric tons, or 93.6% of its 2011 total. From August on, it didn’t ship more than 500 metric tons a month on average.