The Weight of Stone

When the United States announced a 50 per cent tariff on imports from India, Varun Somani knew it would reorder the business he had built. As founder and managing director of Pacific Group, one of the largest Indian companies that manufacture premium engineered quartz stone for global markets, he has watched the industry multiply tenfold in less than a decade, powered largely by American kitchens and bathrooms. But growth built on a single market is always vulnerable, and Somani had already begun to calculate the risks long before the tariff notice arrived.

“Last year, as part of a general diversification strategy, we decided that 50 percent of revenues should come from other markets,” he says. “We were not expecting big tariffs but we did not want to depend on one country.” The warning now feels prescient: Pacific’s quartz business draws 89 per cent of its revenue from the US and only 11 per cent from the rest of the world. It also sells granite, where 80 per cent of revenues come from outside the US and only 20 per cent from within, but quartz was always the big bet.

That reliance is now under strain, as punitive tariffs and low-cost rivals in Southeast Asia reshape the trade equation. “Unless the tariff comes down to 15 percent, Indian manufacturers will not be able to match the prices offered by emerging markets like Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand,” Somani says. The pressure is not unique to Pacific. India exports about $600 million worth of quartz, making it the world’s largest supplier, with shipments of 70–80 lakh square feet per month to the US, according to industry estimates. “We saw a big demand for quartz in the US between 2013 and 2015 and we imported from China and started supplying,” Somani recalls. He set up a factory in Jaipur—for easy access to nearby quarries and their crushing unit in Kishangarh, although sales and business operations are in Bengaluru—and invested in producing both premium and budget lines. Together, the company’s Breton plant, built around modern Italian technology considered the gold standard in engineered stone, and another that employs China-made machinery produce 1 million sq ft of quartz per month, priced between Rs 400 and Rs 1,600 per sq ft. Super-jumbo “Kreos” slabs that replicate marble and granite now contribute 40 per cent of the company’s revenue. “We have always been more focused on exports because we want to do better value addition,” Somani says.

Now, production has slowed under the weight of tariffs. “My granite factory is still running at 70 percent. We have orders for the next month,” he says. The quartz factory ran only for 10 days in the past month, and that too, for trials and R&D. Granite, quarried mostly from south India, still finds buyers in other markets, though largely for outdoor use, as indoor applications have shifted to ceramics and quartz. “The problem is there are no new colours and many quarries have shut down,” Somani notes.

Even as exports wobble, Pacific is placing bets at home. The company has set a target of Rs 200 crore in the Indian market in the next two years, beginning with a push into Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Ahmedabad, before expanding to Tier-2 cities such as Jaipur, Coimbatore, Lucknow, Indore, and Surat. The domestic product line is tailored for this strategy: a 12mm quartz range for wall cladding and bathrooms, cut-to-size solutions for hotels and large projects, and the Vision Sublime InLayer Series, which mirrors the look and depth of natural quartzites with engineered consistency. Flagship showrooms are planned across major metros to give architects and homeowners direct access to the brand.

India’s granite exports totalled 901 metric tonnes in July 2025, valued at $90.38 million. Quartz, though a smaller volume trade at 186 metric tonnes, continued to show strong demand, bringing in $42.44 million. Together, the two segments accounted for over $132 million in export earnings during the month.

India’s high-quality quartz industry is dominated by three companies—Pokarna, Marudhar, and Pacific—which together account for 40 per cent of exports. Whether they can withstand the tariff shock will determine if India remains at the heart of the global quartz trade, or cedes ground to competitors.

When I call Rahul Jain, managing director, Pokarna Ltd., he is guiding a European client through the factory, trying, like everyone else in the industry, to convince Europe to take a larger slice of what America devoured with ease. “India has the largest installed capacity for quality engineered quartz today,” Jain says. With distributors in France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia, Pokarna is trying to rekindle old relationships with customers in Europe and other markets. The domestic market, once largely ignored by big players, is stirring. “India is a shining market now,” Jain says.

Yet, America remains the gravitational pull. Ninety per cent of Pokarna’s quartz lands up stateside through various distribution channels, even finding its way to the shelves of top retailers including Home Depot. “There is no market like America. A single US customer may order 100 containers of a single colour of quartz if they like it. To sell that much I would otherwise have to travel the world,” says Rahul’s father, Gautam Jain, a pioneer of the Indian quartz industry. A textile man once, he ferried swatches between Bombay and Milan in the 1980s and ’90s until an income-tax officer told him the travel bills would only make sense if he exported something. Stone was a convenience at first: quarries outside Hyderabad were easy to lease and Indian granite was in demand globally. But Americans wanted quartz, a new engineered material made of pulverised crystals bound with resin, pressed and polished into slabs without blemish. Unlike granite, it did not depend on what the earth happened to yield. Its pigments and patterns could be tuned, its dimensions pushed to super-jumbo scale. Where natural stone came with its quirks, quartz promised repetition, precision, the look of nature perfected by industry.

“I thought quartz was something you find in watches,” says Jain, who had never heard of the material. As luck would have it, the raw material was underfoot. In quarries outside Hyderabad, feldspar was being carted off to ceramic plants, and the remnant stone dumped back into the pit. Gautam Jain shipped sacks of these stones to Breton, half-expecting dismissal. But the quartz turned out to be world-class. By 2009 Jain had installed India’s first quartz line in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, using Breton machines. The years following the 2008 global recession nearly broke the fledgling business, but with his bankers firmly backing him, the next decade saw Pokarna rise to become a big name in global quartz.

“Our material commands some of the highest prices in the market,” says Jain, speaking from Venice. The company runs at 15 million square feet capacity and is preparing to push to 25 million. “We want to be the best in the world. Despite tariffs, Indian quartz has a bright future. There is no better alternative for a countertop.” Twenty-five per cent tariff would be no problem, Jain says. “Customers are still buying, if with discounts. A 50 per cent hike, though, cannot be absorbed overnight.”

Indian quartz exports rose sharply after the United States imposed anti-dumping and countervailing duties of more than 300 per cent on Chinese quartz surface products in 2019. China had been the world’s dominant supplier, accounting for over half of US imports. The penalties shut Chinese players out of the market almost overnight, creating space for India to step in as the largest exporter. That boom has sustained for several years, but its durability is now in question.

For three decades, the SK Group has quarried and shipped the earth. Under the label International Stones, it sent out gleaming blocks of granite extracted from the belly of south India. Shashank Sharma, the group’s executive director, grew up inside that trade, measuring life in container loads and quarry leases. Last November he chose to step sideways into quartz, opening a new plant under the brand name Sketch Quartz on the Tamil Nadu border at Hosur. One hundred and fifty workers were trained to produce an engineered surface that the Americans seemed to want without end.

But by September, the conveyors slowed. There have been no dispatches in the past month. At capacity the plant could have turned out 150 containers a month. The payroll is still being met, though there is no pretense about how long it can last. “Sooner or later,” Sharma admits, “we will have to let people go.” About 20,000 workers across the country power the quartz industry. With analysts expecting the global market for engineered quartz surfaces to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 8.9 per cent, reaching $33.5 billion by 2027, the industry was considered a good bet for investors—until now.

Sharma is preparing for a trade show in Europe, and is looking at the Middle East as a prospective market. “Granite continues to move,” he says. “We also import from Finland, Norway, even Ukraine, whose granite continues to arrive despite the war.” The company sources from Brazil too, its quartzite stones, curiously, sailing under a more benign classification, taxed at only 10 percent by the Trump Administration. One of the most coveted of these Brazilian stones is named Taj Mahal, a pale quartzite priced at four to five times more than Indian granite. But quartz, the product that was meant to carry his group into the future, lies dormant in his new factory, its machines quiet, its promise suspended. His story is not just his own; it is the measure of an industry built on the illusion of certainty in global trade, and reminded, abruptly, how quickly the ground beneath can shift.

For Anupam Periwal of Paradigm, a major exporter of natural and engineered stone with an annual turnover of about Rs 200 crore, the crisis has the sensation of waking up to find the floor gone. “It is like you wake up in the morning and everything is lost,” he says. Tariffs have erased ninety-five per cent of his exports to America. The other markets cannot fill the gap. Profitability is thin, survival purchased only by offering discounts that gnaw away at margins. For several years now, America has been the anchor for Indian stones, the largest buyer of both granite and quartz, in value and in sheer volume. Vietnam is the next big market for granite, amid a global shift to quartz. Meanwhile, supply in India has grown more precarious. Many quarries that once anchored the industry have been shuttered. The Madurai belt for instance yielded shades that once travelled the world—ivory brown, Sivakasi yellow, Sivakasi brown, Kashmir white, Colombo Juparana—but they are all but gone. “Seventeen to 20 per cent granite exported from India goes to the US. That figure is now zero,” Periwal says. Meanwhile, one of his two quartz factories in Hosur has already fallen silent. The banks have begun to call manufacturers, he says, wanting to know how they intend to service loans with the machines idle. “What do we tell them,” he asks, “when we don’t know what is going to happen?”

If trade terms don’t improve with America, Indian granite processing units will have to plead with quarry owners to cut input prices, to make the raw stone cheaper so that margins can be salvaged in processing. One could also hope for the Indian government to curtail rough-block exports, keeping the better colours within India for local use, says Periwal. Rough-block exports of granite, straight from the quarries, come at the risk of ceding international trade volumes to China, which buys the blocks, processes them, and sells them back into the world cheaper than Indian firms can. For now, the industry is in “wait and watch” mode, a phrase that hangs over every conversation in the trade.

Meanwhile, there are those for whom granite is a livelihood, and each cancelled order felt in the rhythm of a household. In Coimbatore, N Palanisamy has worked granite for 25 years, sourcing blocks from the quarries at HD Kote and polishing them into monument-grade stone bound for America. His shipments are steady but modest—four containers a month, an annual turnover of Rs 8-10 crore—supplying both wholesale and retail customers. His sons, who live in Ohio and Georgia, manage the consignments once they land in the US. The family business is rooted in Tamil Nadu’s stone, but its second generation speaks the language of American logistics. The new tariffs have cut those orders in half. At full tilt Palanisamy could dispatch 15 containers a month. He does not look to Vietnam or Turkey, as others do. “We haven’t thought about other markets yet,” he says. That is because there are other sources of livelihood—fields, a dairy farm—that make the granite trade one arm of a broader life. Yet he knows that his stones are not easily substituted. Certain grades, certain finishes, cannot be bought elsewhere. That is the sliver of resilience he counts on.

The way forward, he believes, lies in value addition: in the lettering cut into polished surfaces, the sandblasting, the new precision of laser work. If the stones themselves cannot command higher prices, perhaps the craft laid upon them can. He speaks in the even tone of a man who has seen cycles come and go. “It happens in business,” he says.

In Jaipur, Sahil Khurana of RSG Stones sees a ray of hope where others see only closure. His company owns quarries near Ajmer, the first in India to mine quartzite when he stumbled on a brilliant white deposit in 2018. Having spent a decade supplying natural stone to the United States, he knew the value of what he had found. Brazilian quartzite was already the darling of the American market; if an Indian equivalent could be extracted and marketed with care, there might be a future. And there was. Fifteen to 20 colours of quartzite now come out of Rajasthan, each with its own vein and name, each finding its way into export catalogues.

For RSG, quartzite is a major share of the business. Of the 60 to 75 containers they ship each month, 20 are quartzite, with America being the major destination. As Brazilian suppliers have won an exemption, their quartzite placed in a 10 percent duty slab under “other stones”, a classification distinct from quartz, granite, marble or dolomite—Khurana hopes he can negotiate for the same for Indian quartzite. Quartzite, he argues, deserves to be seen differently. It is natural, unique, unreproducible, every block bearing patterns that no factory can imitate. RSG will not touch engineered stone as a matter of policy. “Anything manufactured and created in a factory will have no uniqueness,” Khurana says. “It will ultimately get down to price points. India will always trail China in volume and cost, and there is also the threat of anti-dumping action that may hang over Indian quartz as it once did over Chinese.”

“If a company keeps its ear to the ground, it can survive upheaval and shift when the terrain demands,” says Sreenivas Bhagathula, who has run operations at Magna Group India and spent three decades in the granite trade. He remembers a cautionary tale from the early 2000s: a Chennai firm that shipped black granite to Japan, polished into solemn perfection for tombstones. They missed the tremor when Chinese exporters crept into the same market, undercutting them on speed and price, until the Japanese buyers quietly moved on. It’s a humbling lesson for all Indian stone exporters—that advantage is never permanent, that the world’s taste can change as abruptly as its trade winds. The industry has learned to thrive on America’s hunger and to suffer at its caprice. What remains now is the stone itself, still abundant, still worked with craft, waiting to see whether the world will pay its worth.

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