2022 U.S. Hard-Surface Imports
Trends and Numbers
The Trends
By Emerson Schwartzkopf
Remember this line about the 2022 summary of U.S. hard-surface import numbers? "The final months, however, left an uncertain feeling about prospects for 2023." 2022's fourth quarter ended up annoucing, in clear and somber numbers, that the home-improvement boom sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic was over. The money that fueled renovations of hundreds of thousands of kitchens, baths and backyard went to other household extras like travel (plus some burn-off due to inflation. The end result in 2023, however, didn't involve the hard-surface market cratering, as it did in the Great Recession of the late 2000s.The flow of natural stone, quartz surfaces and porcelain-based materials into the United States ebbed into a constant, more-realistic flow.
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. The first page of Stone Update Magazine’s 2023 report tracks a few import 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 Fall Below $5 Billion in 2023.
The $4,720,267,077 in customs value for U.S. hard-surface imports last year is 15% lower than 2022, reflecting the slower demand in home improvements as the COVID-19 boom faded. Quartz Surfaces took the hardest hit among major sectors, with its $1.4 billion dropping 19% from its 2022 record high. Worked Granite declined 18.4% year-over-year with its devilish $666.6 million in 2023, and the previously hot sector of Other Stone took a 16.5% slide to $461.3 million.
The only sector to avoid a double-digit decline in annual import value was porcelain, with a 9% decline to $1.2 billion. However, that total is for all porcelain imports, including all sizes from larger-than-mosaic to slab. (It's the same with all the natural-stone and quartz-surface sectors, BTW.) 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 billion in 2023 still leads other hard-surface types. The 15.6% slide from 2022 was the largest factor in dropping total import values below $5 billion.
2023: Natural Stone
2023: Quartz Surface
2023: Porcelain
3. U.S. Hard-Surface Demand is a Rocky Road
The journalist Jeff Greenfield coined the acronym MEGO nearly 40 years ago, as in "My Eyes Glaze Over." He was referring to anything involving the World Bank, but it's also appropriate in dealing with hard-surface import timelines. The following charts are worth more than a MEGO, however. They're a quick summary of what's happened to the industry since the peak times of the mid-2000s, when the combination of new material discoveries, the rise of CNC technology, and a booming housing-construction market combined for what seemed a never-ending climb.
The first chart shows the peak of the four largest natural-stone-import sectors in 2007, and the sharp ride down in the Great Recession. After hitting bottom in 2009, the shipments recovered until the mid 2010s, when the lead sector of granite started a slow decline. Marble's rise started before the pandemic, but demand increased in 2021-2022, along with other stone. All the natural-stone sectors dropped off last year as the pandemic boom wound down.
Track quartz-surface imports along that same timeline, and there's a completely different story -- until 2023. To be fair, import data for quartz surfaces until the early 2010s is a mess, with shipments being labled as anything from agglomerated surfaces (the correct definition) to tile to cement slabs. Consistent import reporting evolved around 2012-2013, when shipment totals began to rise.
Quartz-surface imports from China fueled the quick growth until 2018, when large anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs took effect in the United States. The pandemic boom signaled a large takeoff in imports that continued until the fourth quarter of 2022. Quartz surfaces weren't immune to the doldrums created when home-improvement demand tapered off. 2023 marked the first decline created not by tariff policies, but by market demand
4. A Slab-for-Slab Comparison?
Comparing the import volume of natural stone with quartz surfaces is almost impossible, since natural stone is measured by weight in metric tons and quartz surfaces by area in square meters. (We convert m² to ft² here, since more than 80% of readers are in the United States).
Almost impossible. What about converting materials to the same measurment. The result would be, to use the fruit analogy, comparing Red Delicious to Honeycrisp, but at least both are apples.
Two years ago, Hard-Surface Report began working on a way to convert material weight into a comparable area size -- in other words, make everything in stone either a 2cm or 3cm slab. We worked up average weights and fed them through several calculations, dividing the import stream into 80% 2cm and 20% 3cm.
The result is a very crude estimation of market share by pretending that all natural-stone imports are slabs. It's not going to match up with everyone's shop workflow, but at least we can guess at the real impact of quartz surfaces overall in the market.
And since we're in the world of guesswork, here's the slab-simulation model developed at Hard-Surface Report by mixing in U.S. production of all materials.
Continue to the next two pages to see the actual numbers (without simulations) for each sector in volume and value.