Why the natural stone industry urgently needs a new business model ?

Consider the following-

1. There is a massive surplus of slabs in the world, when you add the production of natural stone, quartz, big format porcelain, all together.

2. By definition, slabs are a semi-finished product and they ALL have to pass through the fabricators who have to measure, cut, and install the stone, quartz and porcelain, whatever be the application. There is simply not enough demand in the world once you consider that the quartz factories and the porcelain factories all over the world are also suffering from overcapacity and constantly declining prices.

3. There is no reason to assume that the world economy will recover sharply in the short and medium term- these are just empty speculations with no solid basis.

4. Let us examine briefly the competition of natural stone. Quartz is a convenience product, wholesalers, fabricators and specifiers all prefer something that is uniform, standardised, relatively hassle free.

Big format porcelain is much thinner, thus lighter, easier to handle, faster to instal since the tiles can be of bigger size. Speed of installation is important in an age where qualfied labour is scarce and expensive.

5. Natural stone has the argument of uniqueness, but this argument is more effective in the premium segment, which also is overcrowded with so many attractive stones now in the world market. The argument of Sustainability is powerful, but is effective only in projects of a certain size. In decoration or small size applications most people just don't care about carbon footprint, etc.- aesthetics and other aspects are more important to final consumer.

6 The natural stone industry needs to ask itself a different question, based on versatility. What can we do with natural stone that cannot be copied easily, has a potential huge market, and which plays to our strengths- that of personalising, of craftsmanship, thus highlighting the uniqueness ? What can we do to make thickness a virtue offering possibilities and not something that means prohibitive transport costs ?

What can we do with small blocks, why do we have to be obsssed with considering big size blocks as desirable and the smaller ones as ' second quality ' ? Why do we need to value uniformity when the ' defects of nature' are what precisely that makes natural stone so attractive ?

7. Once we ask these questions, the answers will start emerging.

Anil Taneja,

Director,

LITOSonline.com