U.S. International Trade Commission
Quartz Surface Products (Remedy)
Testimony of Marty Davis
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 9:30am
Location: Main Hearing Room, USITC Building
Good morning Chair Karpel and Commissioner Kearns. My name is Marty Davis, and I am the Owner and Manager of Cambria. I appreciate this opportunity to testify to the U.S. International Trade Commission subsequent to your finding that our domestic industry has indeed been seriously injured by a massive flood of imports.
I cannot tell you how grateful our domestic industry is for your determination and commitment to fair trade for the U.S. quartz surfaces industry. You have recognized the years of struggles that our industry has faced from wave after wave of unfairly traded imports. Your decision sets the stage for a strong and appropriate remedy that will give the domestic quartz surfaces industry a chance to recover, invest, further expand, grow, and thrive in America. We appreciate the incredible amount of hard work that the Commission and staff have already done in the injury stage of this investigation.
When I was here to testify in February, I explained the serious injury that the domestic industry has suffered due to this global import surge. After we first filed antidumping and countervailing duty cases to address unfairly traded imports from China in 2019, multiple companies were investing heavily in building new quartz factories in the United States and expanding existing U.S. factories. Cambria alone invested over $100 million in our Minnesota factory expansion beginning in 2019.
At that same time, foreign quartz surfacing production began to quickly transition from China to other countries; popping up production lines in India, Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and many others, often in collaboration with Chinese equipment, U.S. importers and Chinese companies. Unfortunately, this meant that the relief from illegal Chinese imports violating existing U.S. trade law – relief we had received from the Trade Commission – was very short-lived. A massive second wave of imports was already building to target the U.S. market, the most sought-after market for building products in the world, by far, and once again, imports of quartz surface products dramatically flooded the U.S. building products market.
This second wave of imports began to devastate the U.S. quartz surfaces manufacturing industry and greatly diminished any hope that we were going to enjoy the Free and Fair trade we had fought for, and thereby compete fairly in free markets ensuring earned competitive returns from our large investments. Demand for quartz surfaces has increased substantially, just as we had anticipated, yet, at the same time, domestic production and market share declined rapidly. Brand new and existing U.S. plants were idled, and some even mothballed and closed. There were substantially fewer American workers employed in the quartz surfaces manufacturing industry in 2025 than were in 2020. Those jobs went offshore, largely to the Pacific Rim. We were forced to first delay and then stop our investment and growth plans. With huge growth in demand for quartz surfacing products, it was clear that the downward spiral in our domestic manufacturing industry was the result of the injurious impact from this avalanche of imports. This flooding was orchestrated by U.S. importers working closely in partnership with foreign governments and foreign companies.
The Commission found that imports were indeed a substantial cause of serious injury to our U.S. domestic quartz surfaces industry; it is now critical that we craft a remedy that will address that injury. Cambria stands ready to reactivate its expansion plans with massive investments in new production capacity and hiring multitudes of additional American workers. This effort by Cambria and other companies in the United States will also greatly expand the entire supply chain that supports the U.S. quartz surfaces production industry. To make this a reality, we need very strong relief that we can count on!
Aggressive quotas are critical to achieve free and fair trade in the U.S. quartz market. People WILL do in the future, as they HAVE DONE in the past, in like circumstances. The coalescing partnership of U.S. importers– foreign governments – and foreign companies, together, has proven in the past to be skillfully creative and tactically effective in avoiding tariffs and U.S. trade law.
The use of evasive measures to game American trade policy has never been more rampant. Today’s sophisticated digital technology has rapidly enhanced foreign governments and foreign companies to work with U.S. importers to skillfully succeed in comprehensive mass import, skirting and violating U.S. trade law. Additionally, imported quartz is using embargoed Russian Oil, a key raw material in quartz surfacing. Imagine, the average sales price of imported quartz is 65% of our U.S. raw material cost! This is all born of unfair trade perpetrated to hijack U.S. slab manufacturers, and now too, the American Fabricator. Such cheap trade is achieved on the backs of foreign oppressed labor, gamed currency, foreign government subsidy, state ownership, manipulation in labeling fraudulent reporting, and much more… all to skillfully avoid U.S. trade law compliance.
A proper quota will enable the domestic industry to fairly recover market share and restore earned profitability in a market derived from free and fair enterprise. Consumers and fabricators will have more than sufficient access to quartz surfaces.
The quartz market was largely created by U.S. domestic producers and on-shored U.S. brands, not at all by a foreign supply from the Pacific Rim. The Pacific Rim supply developed more than a decade after the U.S. quartz surfacing market began. This foreign supply was spawned to steal U.S. markets by copying existing U.S. producers, engaging in unfair trade, violating existing U.S. trade and intellectual property laws. All that offshored capacity should have been built in America, and still can be!
It is important for me to mention that these measures will also address the serious and growing problem of increasing imports of fabricated quartz surfacing that also injure U.S. fabricators. It is very clear — this flood of quartz imports is not just injuring domestic slab producers—it is rapidly and increasingly displacing the vital and valued work performed by sophisticated, high-quality, professional U.S. fabricators. These imported fabricated quartz products arrive ready for installation and entirely bypass the domestic fabrication industry. In the end, cheap imported slabs and imported fabricated quartz stimulate a cheap, low-quality fabrication sector that undercuts legitimate high quality professional U.S. fabricators, both through artificially cheap prices and damage to the quality reputation of the marketplace. U.S. domestic fabrication shops that cut, polish, and finish slabs for end customers, are now being hijacked. As a result, fabricators are losing both volume and more importantly, that competitive margin that is only born of free and fair trade! Unfair competition will flood the market with cheap products, result in fabricators losing more margin, reduce workweeks, eliminate capital investments, and cut investments in expanding their workforce! This, as overall demand for countertops remains strong. A properly structured safeguard, covering fabricated imports, is a must! It is obvious–any flooding with fabricated quartz surfaces hijack BOTH domestic slab supply and high quality, professional domestic fabricators.
There are estimated to be approximately 10,000 fabricators in the United States, all with very diverse business models. A large campaign toward the U.S. fabrication industry has been staged in an effort to manipulate and gaslight the narrative surrounding this safeguard case. It’s being spun —with false narratives, “spewed about” in efforts to stop this safeguard petition, and further to damage the persona and reputations of U.S. manufacturers! It's dirty pool! A campaign by who, one may ask, … obviously … by the huge, multi-million and billion dollar U.S. Import companies! U.S. importers who have simply drafted behind and so richly prospered on the backs of American manufacturing and their workers, and, too, on the backs of oppressed foreign labor workers. Their lucrative riches are achieved by exploiting our U.S. markets with cheaply-priced copycats, from artificial, foreign-gamed economics of sub-capitalist controlled governments, and full-on communist governments! Sophisticated U.S. importers, with long-developed import schemes are greatly damaging the very industry they use and pretend to be a friend of, the U.S. Fabricator, and they portray the U.S. manufacturers as the corrupt “boogeyman”, doing harm to the U.S. fabricator, through our remedies to stop the cheating. It's all bunk! These U.S. importers have started phony campaigns to boycott Cambria, “Save quartz workers,” and various other shenanigans! What a complete fraud! It's nonsense and the exact opposite of the actual Truth!! These same U.S. Importers did this to the U.S. granite, dimension stone, and flooring industry some years ago. I challenge the U.S. fabricator to require your U.S. Importer friends to commit to you, contractually, to cease immediately importing any fabricated quartz and further commit to never, ever import fabricated quartz, or any fabricated stone for that matter. Let’s find out how good of friends these US Importer, Anti-US Slab Manufacturer campaigners really are to the US fabricator! My warning to US fabricators, don’t be used.
These U.S. importers accumulate huge riches, gained egregiously by exploiting this all! Only after the U.S. market exploded from 2000 to 2013, did these predatory U.S. importers, the Walmarts of U.S. stone products, work to activate foreign supply chains to steal and hijack American quartz markets with doctored economics from the Pacific Rim. The US Importer employees are often based in India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.; yet they profess this false mantra of being U.S. companies. They didn’t expand their companies in the U.S.! They did not invest in U.S. manufacturing in say Ohio or Texas, or even California. They often just rent showroom space in the United States and put their name on the door and call the product theirs, as if they made it! The sign on their showroom should say, “Pacific Rim, Imported Showroom Products!” These U.S. import companies are orchestrating this opposition to the safeguard solely to protect this very lucrative import scheme!! A safeguard will ensure capitalism, born of free enterprise, re-emerges and value performers in the industry return to equitable margins, margins earned by the work performance of a U.S. worker competing fairly against a foreign worker! Presently, under these conditions, a U.S. worker has to compete against an entire foreign government treasury and U.S. importers, and that’s not a fair match-up!
These circumstances result from ill-fated trade policy and lack of enforcement following China’s entrance into the WTO in 2001, whereby this very safeguard protection was instituted solely to prevent China and its neighbors from doing exactly what they are doing in our quartz industry. Since the 2001 WTO/China fiasco, 4,000,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost to unfair trade, much of it to the Pacific Rim. This safeguard will help restore work to legitimate, high quality professional U.S. fabricators and U.S. slab manufacturers. It will strengthen the domestic supply chain, and ensure that the benefits of relief extend beyond slab manufacturers and fabricators to the huge American downstream supply industries that depend on the demand in our domestic quartz industry.
As to new home affordability: the narrative that quartz safeguards will greatly increase the cost of a new or remodeled home is complete nonsense! The total cost of a newly constructed home in America is hardly influenced by imported building products much at all! Roughly 30 % of the cost of a new home comes from building products—and only 7% of building products are imported, such that only 2% of the cost of a new home even comes from any imported building product, it’s minuscule…..a stalking horse! And to be sure, these figures are cited by the National Home Builders Association. It's all just more gaslighting by self-serving, highly enriched U.S. Importers. The countertop in a home averages in total, less than 1% of the cost of a new home, and much of that cost is domestically derived by fabrication and installation, having very minimal impact on U.S. home construction cost, mortgage rates and regulations. In great contrast, a U.S. quartz manufacturer is greatly damaged by unfairly traded imported building products. It’s a perfect paradigm of the need for a safeguard. The domestic market consumer's reduction in cost from an imported product is minuscule, yet the impact of the cheaply imported product on a U.S. manufacturer is cataclysmic! Case in point—The Caesarstone quartz plant closed their $100M factory in Georgia, the Guidoni family of Brazil is closing their $100M factory in Georgia, and the LX family of Korea, has its factory on the brink, all because of unfairly traded quartz. Now that’s cataclysmic.
We need to ensure that foreign producers and importers are not circumventing this relief, we need strong monitoring and enforcement, including strict country-of-origin labeling enforcement. That is, each slab that enters our country must be labeled with its country of origin.
Commissioners, only strong and effective relief will restore a functioning fair market and give domestic producers a legitimate fair opportunity to compete, invest in growth, and serve end users, workers, suppliers, and fabricators. Anything less will leave these manipulated distortions of U.S. markets in place and ensure that the injury you have already found, will worsen.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, …and thank you for allowing me to testify today! I look forward to your questions.