2024 U.S. Hard-Surface Imports
Trends and Numbers
The Trends
By Emerson Schwartzkopf
For U.S. hard-surface imports, 2024 showed the market reaching a fairly steady flow. With few exceptions, shipments of natural stone, quartz surfaces, and porcelain kept pace with 2023. Whether it’s really the new normal, or the calm before the on-again/off-again 2025 tariff tsunami, is still anyone’s guess. In most areas, 2024 imports continued multi-year trends. Quartz surfaces gained big. Granite declined. And both Marble and the Other Stone sectors continued gains in market vale. Are there other stories woven into the import data from the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC)? Let’s take a look. 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 2024 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 at $5 Billion ... Almost.
The $4,967, 389,213 in customs value for U.S. hard-surface imports last year fell just shy of topping the $5 billion mark. However, it reversed last year decline to finish 8.7% ahead of 2023. Quartz Surfaces led all sectors at $1.6 billion, moving 13.8% ahead of 2023. Other Stone (including quartzite) took a big step up, with its $568.7 million topping the previous year by 22.6%. Marble’s $682.5 million bested 2023 by only 3.1%, while Granite dropped $598.9 million for a year-over-year decline of 10.1%. Porcelain imports essentially stayed in neutral for 2024, with the $1.2 billion showing a small decline of 1.6% from 2023. 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 essentially represents what the exporter receives as goods are shipped away; 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 Still #1 in Surfacing Imports ... in Value.
The combined total of dimensional natural stone of $2.1 billion in 2024 still leads other hard-surface types. Quartz surfaces gained 2.2% from 2023 at the expense of natural stone and porcelain.
2024: Natural Stone
2024: Quartz Surface
2024: Porcelain
3. U.S. Hard-Surface Demand Tilts Towards Quartz Surfaces.
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 natural-stone sectors weakened in 2023 as the COVID bump in remodeling petered out, but all the major types managed a comeback in 2024 ... except for granite.
Quartz-surface shipment data tells a different story. The surfacing material suffered a setback in 2023, but boomed last year to reach a new record high. Import data for quartz surfaces until the early 2010s is, to be charitable, unreilable with shipments misidentifed as tile and cement slabs. Consistent import reporting evolved around 2012-2013, when major importing manufacturers gained control of U.S. distribution..
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. Other countries quickly picked up the slack and fed U.S. demand. Quartz shipments also dipped in 2023, but came back stronger than ever last year to more than 232 million ft². Take away the speed bumps of higher Chinese tariffs and the 2023 post-COVID slowdown, and quartz-surface imports have an almost-constant growth rate since ... 2012.
4. When You Make Everthing a Slab ....
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. (And, because we can't separate 30cm x 30cm tiles from slabs, we're leaving porcelain out of this comparison.)
Fou 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 natural stone either a 2cm or 3cm slab. We worked up average weights and fed them through several calculations, dividing the import stream into 50% 2cm and 50% 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.