2022 U.S. Hard-Surface Imports
Trends and Numbers
The Trends
By Emerson Schwartzkopf
2022 looked to be a stellar year for U.S. hard-surface imports, with monthly total values finally topping a half-billion dollars in June --- and then doing it three more times. The year finished above $5.5 billion for dimensional natural stone, quartz surfaces, and porcelain, setting another record. The final months, however, left an uncertain feeling about prospects for 2023. Import data is the biggest aid in tracking the U.S. hard-surface market. Up to 90% of natural stone, and about two-thirds of all quartz surfaces and porcelain, comes from outside U.S. borders. Since U.S. production isn’t reported, the import numbers offer the best look at market direction.
This page of Stone Update Magazine’s 2022 report takes a look at a couple of trends using interactive charts. If you’re looking for the numbers that make up the graphs, put your cursor (or, on mobile devices, your finger) on the different-colored bars and dots to get pop-ups of data. The next two pages are a summary of hard-surface imports for each sector, including the top 10 importing countries. You can get monthly data on all hard-surface sectors with our monthly Hard-Surface Report magazine. To learn more, go to https://www.hardsurfacereport.com.
1. Hard-Surface Imports Top $5.5 Billion in 2022.
The $5,559,934,822 in customs value for U.S. hard-surface imports is 6.7% ahead of 2021, and 30.4% larger than the total in 2017. Porcelain became the biggest gainer, with its $1.3 billion moving 16.9% ahead of 2021. Granite faltered a bit, with its $817.7 million dropping 1.9% from the previous year. Quartz slab came in with the biggest value at $1.7 billion … but that’s only a 1.3% gain from the previous year. Customs value is roughly equivalent to the concept of free-on-board, which is the value assigned to imported goods when loaded onto whatever gets them to the U.S. port-of-entry. It doesn’t include the cost of shipping and other related charges, nor does it include the U.S. tariffs (if any) that need to be paid to clear customs.
2. Natural Stone Remains #1 in Surfacing Imports.
The combined total of dimensional natural stone of $2.4 billion in 2022 still leads other hard-surface types – although quartz slab ($1.7 billion) and porcelain ($1.3 billion) continue to catch up. It's a long way from 2017, when natural stone accounted for more than half of import shipments.
2022: Natural Stone
2022: Quartz Slab
2022: Porcelain
3. Inventories are a Lousy Hedge Against Inflation
To be honest, the next two charts are the kind of graphics that make readers desperate to look at anything else. However, it’s also the best way to make sense of what’s happened to the cost of the major materials in countertops and other decorative hard-surface uses. The charts are also a caution about using the U.S. inflation rate to diagnose the economic health of the hard-surfaces industry. Knowing the rate of inflation helps to determine many things; however, with hard-surface imports, it’s akin to using a ruler to predict the weather.
The first chart shows the last six years of natural-stone imports’ value-per-unit, or VPU, where the customs value of each sector is divided by the tons of material received at U.S. ports-of-entry. The VPU is far from the actual price of slabs arriving at fabricator back doors, but it’s the most-consistent way of measuring import-material costs. The important concept to grasp here is not to try and parse every dot on the chart, but to see the overall path of travel for each natural-stone sector. The smooth purple swath in the middle shows the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI), the standard measurement of inflation. (The CPI starts at a VPU of $800 for illustration purposes).
Look at the starting and ending points for each natural-stone type. Only two of them – other stone and travertine – finish at a higher VPU at the end of 2022 from the first quarter of 2017. And only other stone, which includes quartzite, manages to beat the rate of inflation. Every other sector takes a price path that isn’t even close to following the CPI. Natural-stone values depend on a variety of factors – basic quarry availability, governmental action, even civil unrest – as well as the economic health of exporting countries.
The chart below tracking quartz slab and porcelain VPUs (dividing values by square feet) is the dullest in this year’s import review, save for 2022’s fourth quarter. The CPI rate isn’t included as part of this one, since neither sector came even close to breaking the inflation barrier until the final three months of last year.
Was that December VPU jump for quartz slabs and porcelain a trend or a one-timer? Early trade data from January shows that VPUs came down significantly, with quartz slab coming in at $8.20 and porcelain at 99¢.
The large VPU increases in December with quartz surfaces and porcelain came with large declines in shipments, which leads us to ….
4. The Fourth-Quarter Follies
October, November and December rarely represent the strongest time for U.S. hard-surface imports. October generally marks the end of the major construction season; December is the start of the “Queasy Quarter” where, through the end of February, shipments vary due to lesser demand and various overseas work slowdowns (such as the Lunar New Year).
However, when comparing last year’s fourth-quarter shipments to the end of 2021 – a banner year for hard-surface imports – the results are startling.
The biggest surprise is quartz slab, where the volume going through U.S. ports-of-entry shrunk by 40% from fourth quarter 2021. Anyone following the review of unfair-trade tariffs on quartz surfaces by the U.S. Commerce Department last year would correctly guess that India’s 4Q year-over-year shipments fell hard (-57.8%), and trade actions against major Malyasian exporters would all but cut off (-90.7%) that country’s shipments However, of the top 10 quartz-surface exporting countries to the United States, all but one declined in fourth-quarter shipments, with other countries’ slumps ranging from -24% (Vietnam) to -50.4% (Taiwan). The only positive fourth-quarter move? While every other country fell by double-digits, Thailand grew by triple digits (104.2%) to 3.1 million ft² to place fourth among foreign quartz-surface suppliers. The slowdown doesn’t stop with quartz surfaces. To illustrate the overall rate of decline, let's take a quick look at two of the major exporters of multiple hard-surface sectors: India and Brazil.
India’s year-over-year fourth-quarter performance took the biggest hit with quartz, but other major categories suffered as well. Only porcelain provided positive numbers.
Brazil’s quartz-surface exports aren’t among the top 10 – it makes up 1% of the total shipments to the United States – but it ranks fifth among all countries for marble and porcelain, and remains the leader in supplying granite and other stone.
Overall, 2022 fourth-quarter hard-surface imports are marking a change in industry demand. Whether this is the new normal, or only the first step down, should be apparent by early summer this year.